A Federation of Cassandras
by FoiPur
Summary: In which Renesmee runs away.
1. Prologue

Carlisle believed that she should have a classical education. The first languages she learned under his tutelage were Greek and Latin, and she read Homer and Virgil and Ovid and Herodotus and all those other men who mattered so much to the Great Western World. She didn't really enjoy it and they moved quickly on to other things, but a few years later when she was reading Romantic poetry he backtracked and gave her a volume of Plutarch. She was puzzled and a little annoyed, but she read it, and to the last moment of her life she didn't forget it.

There was a story inside about a Spartan youth who stole a fox. Some of his superiors met up with him on the road and he was terrified that they would find out what he had done, so he hid the fox beneath his cloak and strode up to greet them. When the fox began to disembowel him right there, in the middle of the road under his cloak, he didn't make a sound. He was a Spartan, after all. He could have flung the fox away and perhaps kept his intestines, but the shame of being found out was by far the more frightening prospect.

If Renesmee had been a little older she would have known that you can't do that forever—bite your lip and hope no one notices that something is killing you. Eventually you scream or fall over or bleed out on the ground, and everyone knows. Everyone knows and it's already over.

And that's exactly what happened.


	2. Chapter 1

Fatima spent almost every Saturday by the Pont d'Austerlitz, people-watching. She sat for hours, swinging her legs against the bottom row of what she'd started to call _her _amphitheater, one of many that lay like shells against both sides of the river in this part of Paris.

She did this because her home, while only a few metro transfers north, was not a pleasant, fertile background for the imagination of a young woman with no siblings. She lived in a grim, gray world, and weekends were for escaping. So, she sat by the river and watched the dogs and the _bateaux-mouches _and the hundreds and hundreds of people enjoying the September weather. There were irritated old men and freely laughing women, children screeching at each other and darting inelegantly through the Saturday foot traffic. They all seemed completely unaware how many stories their faces told—if they were frustrated or frightened or giddy with romance, it was stamped there in a quirking grin or bitten lip.

She liked to imagine their reasons for being out on the street. The tiny woman who walked by at noon every Saturday with the exact same sort of melon under one arm was taking fruit to her aging father—it was one of the only treats his doctor still allowed him and his daughter cut it carefully and served it rindless, setting it beside him with a kiss to his forehead. The gangly boy heading briskly for the metro had heard that the girl he was in love with was going to be at a café nearby at such-and-such a time, and he was planning to show up accidentally and sit at the next table. Here, by this bridge, Fatima could pretend that she understood why people did what they did, and the feeling was addictive.

Today she had a book in her hands, but she wasn't reading it. She was staring absently at a boat of tourists and thinking about being a foreigner. She was one herself, of course, even though she'd lived all but a few months of her life in this city. The hijab usually gave her away, and Parisians could be…well…a little xenophobic. If Fatima and her father had come to see the Eiffel Tower and stay a few weeks in a hotel, like these people, they would have been tolerated with a bit more grace put still probably not _liked_. The French didn't really like anybody, but the tourists rarely seemed to notice. All the fat Americans in shorts felt perfectly comfortable leaning over the edges of their tour boats, snapping away at their expensive cameras. Did that woman just take a picture of her? Fatima flushed and looked back down at her book, catching a glimpse of her watch as she did so. It was getting late; she hadn't told her father where she was going and he was probably worried. She popped her knuckles and shouldered her bookbag, glancing west down the sparkling expanse of water. A huge mastiff pranced through her line of vision with its owner, and when it passed Fatima saw a woman standing at the edge of the walk that she hadn't noticed before.

She was still as a statue, her coppery hair obscuring her profile. She was tall, and Fatima could have sworn there was a faint glow around her—like some sort of Christian saint in a medieval painting. She was looking out over the water with her hands by her sides and a tattered backpack leaning against her right leg. When a soft breeze threw her curls back and Fatima got a brief look at her face, all she could see was that the woman looked sad, sad and a little desperate. Her jaw was locked.

"Desperate" was not a look Fatima usually associated with anyone this close to the center of Paris. The woman wasn't going to commit suicide, was she? Not in the middle of the day, and definitely not from the edge of the sidewalk. Even the bridge probably wouldn't be high enough, unless she timed it so she landed on a boat…

Fatima shook her head to dispel this morbid train of thought and took a few steps forward. Should she say something? She had no idea how to start a conversation. She watched people; she didn't talk to them. But something about this pretty young woman (she looked to be around Fatima's age) made Fatima want to say something comforting, induce a smile on that sad, hopeless face. She mounted the steps and walked casually up to the woman, who still hadn't moved.

"You're in the City of Love, you know." Fatima cringed as soon as the words left her mouth. What a stupid thing to say. The woman whipped her head around and looked at Fatima, startled. She was even more beautiful up close.

"Uh, yeah. So I've heard."

Her voice was lower than Fatima expected. There was a moment when the two of them looked silently at each other, and then the woman turned her head again to stare at the opposite bank. Fatima couldn't blame her; what kind of a conversation starter was that? _You have no right to be sad, really, since you're here…_Could she have been any more insensitive? She tried again.

"Are you American? I mean, you don't have an accent or anything but you do have a backpack, so…"

The woman gave her a second, appraising look. "I'm not from anywhere, really," She finally said.

"Oh." _What do you say to that?_ "Have you been in Paris long?"

"Just a few days," she said indifferently.

"Right."

Silence descended again between them, and Fatima was starting to get a little annoyed that this woman wasn't putting in any effort whatsoever. Fatima was _trying_ to be nice.

"Have you been here before?"

The woman shifted her weight and looked down at her feet. "Once or twice, yeah. It's been a while."

"Where are you staying?"

"Oh, I…" At that moment the woman's indifference dropped, and Fatima saw a flash of anguish as her eyes darted around, looking for an answer. Fatima noticed for the first time that though the woman was astonishingly pretty, she was incredibly unkempt. Her curly hair was tangled and her clothes were stained with dirt. There were holes in her jeans, and not the fashionable kind.

...with friends," the woman concluded, lifting her chin as though daring Fatima to call her out in the lie. Fatima just looked at her steadily, waiting for another flash of something that might give the woman's story away.

"I'm Fatima," she finally said, giving up.

"Dorianne," said the woman after a short pause. Fatima blinked. With a name like that, maybe she wasn't an American after all.

"It's nice to meet you."

Dorianne just nodded.

"Would you like to come have dinner with me?" Fatima blurted. Where had that come from? Apparently Moroccan hospitality was genetic. She winced and waited for Dorianne's response—she was staring silently into space again, her expression smooth.

"I guess…well, I don't have any plans," she said, turning to Fatima and shrugging her shoulders. "Where do you live?"

"A ways away, actually," said Fatima apologetically. "Out in St. Denis. It's not the nicest environ but it's not hard to get there on the metro…"

For the first time, Dorianne actually smiled.

"That's perfect."

oOo

The trip was awkward. Dorianne had descended immediately into silence as they left the riverbank, and though Fatima scoured her brain for a suitable topic of conversation she came up empty. Whenever she did think of something to say, she got a one-word response and more silence, so she eventually just gave up.

When they reached the metro it suddenly occurred to her that Dorianne might not have any money, but before she could discreetly hand over a coin Dorianne pulled out a Visite card and went right through the turnstile. Fatima shrugged and followed her. On the train they stood side by side, bumping shoulders and staring out the window. Dorianne simply followed her whenever she got off to make a transfer, and they finally emerged into the fading autumn sunshine at Basilique de St. Denis.

"It's almost a mile from here," said Fatima hesitantly. "If you want to try a bus…"

"No, this is fine. We can walk." Dorianne hitched her backpack up on her shoulder and looked at Fatima expectantly, waiting for her to lead the way. Fatima shrugged and pointed left, and they set off for the bookshop.

She found herself absolutely burning with curiosity, but she didn't want to ask too many questions. Who was this girl? What was she doing here alone, looking homeless? She was clearly foreign, though she spoke fluent French without any noticeable accent and she had a French name. She was very, very pale, so she had to be from somewhere in Europe or North America. Maybe she was British?_Québécoise_? No, again, no accent…

She glanced covertly over her shoulder. Dorianne's eyes were darting everywhere, taking in the signs over each dingy hair salon and restaurant. Fatima had been worried that Dorianne wouldn't feel safe, would wonder where the hell this stranger had taken her. She had said that St Denis wasn't "the nicest environ," but maybe she should have mentioned something about the drugs or the hostility or the fact that absolutely everyone was Muslim…She should have, probably, but then Dorianne wouldn't have come with her.

If Dorianne was frightened she was certainly good at hiding it. She simply seemed interested, maybe a little surprised to see this other side of Paris, but not at all afraid. Her unscarfed hair bounced against her shoulders as she walked and four men watched her intently from across the street. She either didn't notice or didn't care. Fatima turned right onto the Rue de Sevran and pointed at the third shop on the street, the one with L-I-V-R-E-S in large letters on its awning.

"That's where I live."

"In a bookstore?"

"Well, above it. It's my father's bookstore."

"Oh."

Fatima felt a vague surge of annoyance. Homeless girl had no place judging the fact that Fatima and her father lived over a bookstore. She pushed open the door and the bell tinkled, signaling her arrival to her father, who came tramping down the back stairs.

"There you are! You really need to stop staying out so late. You know I worry about you." He grasped her shoulders with his knobby fingers and kissed both her cheeks.

"I'm sorry, Papa," she said, dropping her bag by the register. "I met a friend."

"I see that," he said, looking past Fatima's shoulder at Dorianne, who was still standing in the doorway, shifting her weight from foot to foot. "Are you going to introduce me?"

Before Fatima could speak, Dorianne stepped forward and held out her hand. "I'm Dorianne Teintée," she said smoothly. "I hope it's all right that your daughter invited me for dinner."

"Of course," Papa said, nodding at the woman by the door. "My name is Abdul Dehbi, and it's a pleasure to have you with us. Did you and Fatima just run into each other today? You're studying at the Sorbonne, I assume?"

Dorianne blinked. "Oh, no, I…I'm just visiting. I met Fatima this afternoon and she was kind enough…" She seemed to be panicking slightly. "May I use your WC?"

Fatima's head snapped up quickly. British. Definitely British. She realized Dorianne was still looking at her, waiting for an answer. "Oh, yeah, of course. Just go upstairs and turn left. We'll be up in a minute; I'm going to help Papa close the shop."

"Right," said Dorianne with a weak smile. "Thanks." And she headed up the stairs.

"Well," said Papa as soon as Dorianne's footsteps died away. "What exactly have you brought home, my dear?"

Fatima sighed "I don't know, Papa. She just looked lost and I said hello, and then somehow I ended up inviting her here. It's okay, isn't it?"

"Of course it is. You're the one who does the cooking, anyway. Who am I to object?" He locked the front door and turned to face Fatima. "You are beginning to remind me very much of your mother, do you know that? Good women, both of you."

Fatima looked down at the carpet and swallowed. "Thank you, Papa." Then, she lifted her head and smiled at him. "For that, you're getting extra olives."

He chuckled and switched on the outside lights. "Why else would I give you compliments? You don't feed me, otherwise."

* * *

**A/N**:Translations

_Bateaux-mouches_- French name for the tourist boats that cruise the Seine.

_Québécoise_- A woman from Quebec.

_Dorianne Teintée- _Our protagonist has pieced together something that loosely means "The stained one who comes from the sea," depending on how you interpret it. Holy angst, batman...


	3. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Not my sandbox.

Hi everyone! I'm very sorry this chapter took so long. I've been trying to find a good beta and as yet haven't been successful (if you know anyone, please pass their info my way), so I was super paranoid about posting this. Forgive any errors, please.

* * *

_The late afternoon shadows dappled the forest floor where they sat, side by side. His long legs tangled casually across the wet moss, head inclined toward her smaller, cross-legged form. They had spent the whole afternoon hunting, and she had forgotten how much fun it was. She mostly ate human food these days because her family was determined to groom her into civility. She had missed it—the chance to run as hard and fast as her legs would go, the rush that came with overpowering something, bringing it to the ground. _

_Now, full of fresh, delicious blood, she barely remembered the horrible urges that had been plaguing her in ballet class. It was a perfect day, and she should have been happy, but she wasn't. Once again, she was alone with Jacob, airing her grievances. She didn't like being so angry all the time, but these last few months she hadn't been able to help it and couldn't really say why. Everyone was tired of her, exasperated. Everyone but him. She turned a small, white-veined leaf over and over in her hand, refusing to look at him while she spoke. _

_ "I guess I just wish…I dunno…that I didn't owe her my whole existence."_

_ He snorted. "Ness, I hate to break it to you, but everybody owes their mother their existence. Their father too, if you want to get technical..." He shifted slightly and rearranged his position. He did not want to get technical, apparently. Well, neither did she. Flushing slightly, she continued, still not meeting his eyes. _

_ "I'm not an idiot. This is different. It's not that I never would have been alive in the first place; I know that's true for everybody. I mean that she, you know, sacrificed herself for me. I killed her, Jake."_

_ "I think I saw her walking around this afternoon. I'm pretty sure she's not dead."_

_ "Undead, anyway."_

_ "Yeah, and if you ask me she seems pretty happy about it. Happy about _you_, too. I know your mom, Ness. There's no other choice she would have made."_

_ Renesmee huffed in frustration. "I know that, okay? Geez. I…it's just too much, all right? She's already so much more beautiful than I am, so much more patient and sweet and perfect. You know, by the time most teenagers are my age their moms are ugly. Nobody else has to deal with this. Nobody else has a mother who's a college-age supermodel." She threw the leaf at the ground; it swayed unsatisfyingly in the air before landing softly by her right knee. _

_There was another reason, but she couldn't voice it. Her mother's self-control, her perfect ease among humans even though she was still such a young vampire…it looked like Renesmee would never, ever be her mother's equal, in any way at all._

_ He leaned toward her, touched her hair. She moved her hands to her lap so she could not be tempted to share that last, errant thought, and looked up at him._

_ "Don't ever say that," he whispered, tucking a curl behind her ear. Renesmee forgot what she had been thinking. "Don't ever let yourself believe she's more than you, especially…" he shook his head and chuckled, "especially not more beautiful."_

_ Renesmee blinked. His face was very close. His eyes glittered black in the weak sunlight as he stared at her. He had done this many times before, held her and touched her hair and talked to her until she smiled again, but all of a sudden the distance between their bodies seemed tiny and his arms looked so nice and she was dizzy because he had said she was beautiful, and she had read…she had seen…_

_ Before she knew what she was doing she was leaning towards him, letting her eyes fall closed. She pursed her lips a bit, her heart pounding in her ears as she felt his breath across her face, but then his hands were on her shoulders, pushing her backwards as he sharply said her name. She snapped her eyes open and he was looking at her with his brow furrowed, cautious._

_ "Nessie, I don't know what you were thinking, exactly, but…"_

_ She ducked her head as terror rushed from her brain to her stomach. She wanted to be sick. What had she just done? What was he going to think? She chanced a glance at him. He was still looking at her, and he sighed and shook his head when she caught his eye. She felt the foreign sting of rejection at the very depth of her heart, even though she hadn't known she could want something like this ten seconds ago. She was mortified. He was not looking away._

_ "Look, Ness, you know you're my best girl, but you're a kid…"_

_ "Only chronologically!" she said, feeling tears itching at the corners of her eyes. "You know I'm really a teenager." She sounded so desperate. Why couldn't she stop this craziness now and make him think she'd been joking, or something? It was like she was suddenly in the middle of a nightmare._

_ "Sure, sure," he said nervously. "I'm _not_ a teenager. Things don't really work this way."_

_ "Mom was seventeen when Dad was a hundred and seven!" She yelled furiously, wiping her cheeks._

"_Yeah, well, that was different." He looked very uncomfortable now. _

_ She took a deep breath. "You just don't want me. You don't think about me like that." Her voice was quivering, but she did her best to keep it even, reasonable. She could be an adult. She could. "It's all right, you can say so."_

_ "Of course I don't think about you that way! That's not... You're still a girl, Ness."_

_ That was it. He called after her but she was already running, and thirty miles later she realized that he hadn't followed. She kicked at the nearest conifer and wood splintered everywhere, showering her clothes. She was crying too loudly but she couldn't seem to stop. She sank to the ground and buried her head in her drawn-up knees, wishing the world could end now before she ever had to see him again…_

Renesmee woke with a gasp and a start, as she had every morning for the past six weeks. Her heart was racing, her mind disoriented. This, she had long ago decided, was the worst part of every day.

There was something about that moment—that brief space when her thought process was somewhere behind her senses and she opened her eyes wondering why she was staring at a rusty sheet of metal or the open sky instead of the paneled ceiling of her little bedroom in Forks. Today there was a sloping plaster ceiling above her, with cracks running down to faded flowered paper on the walls.

She hated this moment because it was always followed by a rush of sweeping memory that seemed to weight her body to the ground and leave her wanting to do nothing but close her eyes again and curl sideways. Every morning of her life she lived this rediscovery, and at night she stayed up as late as possible, hoping to postpone it.

She blinked and stretched her arms. Beneath her was a nicer mattress than she'd slept on in weeks…

_Of course._

The Muslim girl and her father. They had seen through her pathetic excuses about the friends she'd been staying with and let her sleep in the attic. With last night's memories came the tide of everything else, and confusion gave way to depressed certainty as she sighed and turned sideways. She was not at home because she had run away. She was alone, and she was a terrible, terrible person. Good morning, world.

She sat up, bedsprings screeching as she moved, and set her feet to the dusty wood planks of the attic floor. There was a small window on the opposite wall casting the gray light of early morning over her body. She had not slept too long, then. Good. She had to think.

She knew it had been totally reckless to show up in Paris. Any number of Cullens could arrive today, tomorrow, next week. Her aunts and her grandmother, especially, spent months here sometimes. They bought most of their clothes in Paris and they had taken Renesmee with them more than once—buying her pastries and taking her to museums. It was amazing how a city could turn them all into giddy, carefree versions of themselves, even a family of vampires. That feeling they all shared made it far too likely that at least one of them would come back, even if they had no idea she was here.

But that was exactly why she couldn't stay away. The first random train she'd hopped when she staggered off an oil freighter (as stealthily as possible, of course) had crossed into France, and once she was there the happy memories drew her forward like a magnet and she got the idea in her head that she could keep going, do whatever she needed to do, if she could just see Paris one more time and stand where they'd all stood together and remember that things had been beautiful before she'd begun to destroy them.

So, she came. She found her way to the riverbank almost by accident, led by instinct to a spot of sidewalk where she had stood years before and two feet shorter, holding Alice's hand.

_"Alice, Alice, can we ride a bateau-puce?"_

_ Alice threw her head back and laughed. "Bateau-mouche, Ness. 'Puce' means flea, 'mouche' means fly…" but she couldn't stop giggling. "You're hilarious, child. I know I'm supposed to be stricter with your school stuff, but sometimes… Bateau-puce. You are too cute."_

_"I'm going to learn French just fine! I'm going to come and stay here by myself when I'm grown up and you can come visit with Uncle Jasper."_

_ "Why, thank you." But Alice's eyes had gone unfocused. "Yes…" she said slowly. "You might come back here, alone. But…" _

_She stopped talking and shook her head as if to clear it. "Sorry, of course I can't see you. I just get this sense, sometimes, that you'll be someone else someday. If you stay in Paris, it will be because you'll never be you again…" She was talking to herself now. She dropped Renesmee's hand and began massaging her temples. _

"_Never mind, little monster," she said abruptly, bouncing on her heels. "Shall we ride a boat?" She flashed Nessie a huge grin, grabbed her once again by the hand, and the moment was forgotten._

Apparently her subconscious was trying to tell her something.

Alice had been right. Here she was, standing by the same stretch of water, no longer a Cullen. She was someone or something else entirely. She had no family at all. Alice had sensed it right here, even if she couldn't see it, and Renesmee had made it come true and she could never, never go home and be Nessie Cullen again.

Was this it, then? She knew enough about the way her aunt saw the world to know that she still had a choice—it was hardly written in the stars that she couldn't leave Paris, couldn't keep going on to Istanbul or Moscow or Chiang Mai or anywhere else they wouldn't follow, but there was a strange feeling stealing over her. She liked this idea of stepping, chin raised, into her destiny instead of running like the coward she was from anything painful or difficult. She could do this. If she had to forsake who she was and everyone she cared about, damned if she wasn't going to do it properly.

But what if they found her? She couldn't face them, any of them. Oh, but she was so tired…that bit about being able to run again as soon as she'd spent a few minutes in Paris had been a major piece of self-deception.

Enter Fatima and this perfectly situated attic. As Saint Denis came to life outside the window, Nessie felt a brief, foreign peace steal over her. This was Paris, technically, but there was no way Rosalie or Esme or Alice would ever come here, and it was the last place they would think to look for Renesmee. It was close, so close, to a place they'd expect her to avoid but would probably check anyway, and yet just far enough away that if they were looking for her (and she thought they probably were), they'd never even think of _La Zone_.

She'd gotten a good look around yesterday on the walk from the metro to the bookstore, and she would be lying if she said she wasn't at least a little bit surprised. She'd never thought that France could be unattractive, but there really wasn't any other way to describe Saint Denis. It was made up mostly of gray, concrete blocks that rose eight or ten stories, all residential. The only color dotting the urban landscape through her window was some hanging laundry and several patches of wildly intricate graffiti. Renesmee was used to standing out wherever she went, but the attention she had drawn yesterday was unprecedented. Literally everyone here was African, and Nessie's pale skin and light hair put her under a very unpleasant spotlight. She didn't have to be her father to sense the hostility directed her way by a number of different men, but she was not a human woman and she had no reason to be afraid of staying here.

The only problem was that she was running out of money. She'd been in a bit of a hurry the day she left, so she had just grabbed a giant wad of cash from her parents' nightstand and stuck it in her backpack. Said giant wad of cash wasn't so giant these days, considering she couldn't tap into any of her family's accounts or use any of her cards without them knowing immediately where she was. At this rate, she wouldn't be able to pay for a place to live for more than a month, and that didn't even count food. There was nothing to hunt for miles, unless she started draining poodles. If she lived here, she was going to have to buy normal human food, and there was no way she could afford it. She didn't have any ID for Dorianne and she'd left her Vanessa Cullen passport at home (good riddance), so she was a totally undocumented immigrant. That would make finding a job…difficult. She'd never had a job before, anyway. What was she even supposed to do, if she managed to find some under-the-table work?

She could ask Fatima, maybe, but how? _Hey, I'm here illegally and have no official proof of my own existence. Can you help me find a place where people don't ask questions when they hire you? _Not an option, probably.

She should just go downstairs, she thought, as she stood and straightened the sheets on her trundle bed. She was hungry and she didn't want to overstay her welcome if they expected her to leave this morning. She pulled her dirty jeans back on and tried to cover her tangled, messy hair with an old bandana from the front pocket of her backpack. She really needed new clothes. In a few weeks, these jeans wouldn't fit past her butt anymore. They were already uncomfortably tight and exposed her ankles. When, when would she stop growing?

She made her way as quietly as possible down the creaking stairs to the first floor kitchen and found it empty. There was no one moving around in the other two rooms, either, so she headed for the stairs down into the bookstore. She paused on the top step, seeing a pallet and a pillow next to the banister. Suddenly remembering the skirts hanging in the attic's wardrobe, she realized that Fatima had given up her room and slept by the stairs. Nessie's face started burning—why was she letting this happen? She couldn't intrude on this kind family's life for another hour, eating their food and sleeping on their mattresses. She would say thank you and leave, and buy a loaf of bread somewhere for breakfast.

There was no one downstairs in the store, either. The lights hadn't even been turned on. Renesmee wandered through the dusty aisles, unhindered by the semi-darkness. She'd never heard of any of these books; many of them were in Arabic. There were little signs pasted to the end of each shelf; she was standing in the middle of "Morocco." She pulled down _Camp du Sud_ and opened it; it was a volume of poetry. As she flipped through the pages she heard someone breathing from the very back of the store. She'd been taught well—she knew the noise was outside the range of normal human hearing, so she did what her father had always told her to do and continued to scan the book with her head bent, pretending not to hear.

"Can you read like that?"

Renesmee lifted her head to see Fatima framed in a doorway behind the stairs, watching her.

"What do you mean?"

"Without more light. Here," she said, reaching for a switch and illuminating the store. She walked over to Nessie's side and joined her in staring at the shelf. "Strange, isn't it?" she asked.

_What?_ Surely she couldn't already tell that Renesmee could see in the dark. Was she that bad at being a covert vampire?

"The books, I mean," she clarified when Nessie didn't respond. "This doesn't really seem like the right place to be selling North and West African high literature does it?"

Renesmee put the book back on the shelf. "No, not really," she admitted.

Fatima smiled. "You're right, of course. I can't remember the last time I ever used that thing," she said, pointing at the register.

Renesmee just stared at her.

"Oh, we have enough money," she said quickly, flushing. "Just enough, really. My father's family was ridiculously wealthy. There's not much left now, but there's enough for him to keep this place running, even if no one ever buys another book."

Nessie wanted to ask all sorts of rude questions, like whether Abdul Dehbi was entirely sane, but she couldn't figure out how to word them tactfully. Fatima seemed to know what she was thinking. She opened her mouth, but hesitated before she spoke.

"It's the only thing he can do. He's a brilliant man and life here hasn't been exactly…what he expected. At least, it wasn't like his life here before, when he came to study. This," she gestured to the books in front of them, "is how he copes with it. I think he just has to hope that people will become the sort of people who want to read these books, if that makes sense."

"I suppose so." They stood in silence for a moment, and Renesmee decided it was time for her to leave. She opened her mouth to say 'thank you'…

"Can I ask you something, Dorianne?"

"Uh, yes. Of course."

"Am I right in assuming that you speak fluent English?" Fatima's open face was eager. It didn't escape Renesmee's notice that Fatima had worded the question so that she had not asked where Renesmee was from, as though she knew Renesmee still wouldn't want to tell her.

"Yes, I do."

Fatima nodded, still smiling. "Do you think, maybe, if you don't have any firm plans, you could stay with us for a few days and help me prepare for an exam? I'm afraid I'm going to fail, but there isn't really anyone I feel comfortable asking for help…"

It struck Renesmee that Fatima was more perceptive than she'd originally realized. Fatima knew Nessie would want to leave immediately, and this was a tactful offering of a little more time. She couldn't take it, though. This girl would sleep by the stairs for weeks if Nessie let her.

"Well, maybe I could stop by again for a few hours…" she was interrupted by a growling sound from the vicinity of her stomach. Fatima lifted an eyebrow.

"At least stay for breakfast. Or did you not like my cooking?"

_Checkmate._ "Sure," she said resignedly. "That would be great."

* * *

**A/N-**Credits for the title of this story go to Martha Gellhorn's _The Face of War_. I definitely should have mentioned that a while ago, sorry.

Frenchiness:

_La Zone_- A generic term for the public housing communities surrounding many cities in France and populated mostly by Francophone immigrants. St. Denis is one of the more well-known environs of this type and has the most highly-concentrated muslim population in all of France.

On that note, I am not muslim. I would like to think that I know a good deal about Islam, but since it isn't my faith tradition I'm bound to make mistakes in representing it, and if I do please do not take offense. Send me a message and let me know, so I can correct it.

Many thanks to those of you who left reviews. This time, I will write you back. I promise.

Next chapter coming soon!


	4. Chapter 3

Hello, readers! Another chapter for you, and a big thank you to everyone who was kind enough to leave reviews.

One quick note before we begin: I've gone crazy and signed up for NaNoWriMo (along with a lot of other FF authors), and I will be working on something else, something very much not this story. So, what that means is that I will not be able to work on _Cassandras _in November, seeing as I have to come up with 50k words of an original novel during that period of time. I'm sorry for the hiatus, but I'll pick right up where I left off in December and I hope you won't have to wait too long.

Enjoy!

* * *

"_Nothing's biting today, looks like."_

_Charlie wasn't looking to start a conversation and Renesmee didn't respond. She stared out at the water with her chin in her hand, rocking slightly with the motion of the canoe and feeling a little bit guilty. All the fish were probably cowering at the very bottom of the lake, scales trembling at her very presence. _

_She was ruining his trip, but she couldn't spend another minute at home. She had almost fried her brain trying to keep her most troubling thoughts from her telepathic father. He was listening more carefully than usual now that Renesmee was exhibiting such worrying behavior, and she could barely even think straight for all the layers of mental static she had to cover with. She could have just recited something long in another language whenever her father was in the room, but then he'd know she was hiding something. The subtlety required was giving her migraines._

_Her mother wouldn't leave her alone, either. She alternated between expressing disappointment at Nessie's rudeness to everyone and gazing at her with quiet worry, brows puckered in that way Renesmee found so very, very annoying. And Jacob… _

_She couldn't even be in his presence without her stomach squirming in shame and her face heating up. He'd taken to giving her oh-so-kind shoulder pats in lieu of talking to her, since she could barely speak to him these days. She had never felt anything but ease and rightness with him, but this new humiliation had her by the jugular. She'd lost her only friend. She was seething, sad, lonely, frightened…everything inside her was knotted into a terrible mess and she couldn't even begin to pull it apart. Sometimes it felt like she was barely in control of herself._

_So, here she was, spending her Saturday in Charlie's boat, scaring off his fish. There was something soothing in the breeze and the silence and her grandpa's steady presence—she felt like she could breathe for the first time in weeks. She turned to steal a glance at his profile—he was chewing on his bottom lip and staring placidly at the bobber on his line. She tilted her head, searching out the small changes she knew had occurred since she last saw him__—_a new line in his face, a slightly grayer tint to his mustache, something. Charlie was the only person in her family who altered, whose body was every moment marching slowly toward death and decay and a final ending. She loved him.

_Charlie lifted a hand from his fishing rod and ran his thumb over his mustache. "Ballet class, huh?"_

_So he did want to talk. Renesmee sighed and turned her eyes to the forest. "Yeah."_

"_Is this something you want to do or something they're making you do?"_

"_I…I like it. They thought I needed to meet other kids, you know. And I'm good at it. I really am."_

_Charlie snorted. "I don't doubt it. It wouldn't take much for you to be better at it than your mother was, anyway."_

_Now he had her attention. "What do you mean?"_

"_Bells was the biggest klutz anyone who knew her had ever seen, back before… well, you know…" He gestured vaguely at the air, not knowing how to put his daughter's transformation into words. "Her mother put her in ballet class when she was…your age…?" He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, trying to decide how old she was that day. "No, sorry, she was a lot younger. I forget, you know. Swear you were born yesterday. Anyway, it was a total disaster. Even Renee had to admit Bella would probably just fall off the stage, no matter how cute she looked in a tutu."_

_Nessie laughed, and Charlie turned to look at her, startled. Apparently he'd been informed about her Epic Bad Mood. He was looking at her more closely now, as though he were assessing her age again. "Any boys in that ballet class?"_

_Nessie blushed. "No."_

"_Thank God," he muttered. _

_Water slapped at the edges of the canoe as Nessie sat in silence, puzzling out her grandfather's thoughts. "What's wrong with boys?" she finally asked. _

_Charlie grunted. "Plenty. Just…don't even think about it. Your mother put me through enough of that for five of you."_

_Of course she did. "What, with my dad? What did they do?"_

"_Drove me crazy, that's what. The stunts those two pulled… Nobody can blame me for thinking she would have been better off with Jacob Black."_

_Renesmee froze. She waited for Charlie to keep talking, but he seemed content to resume their previous silence. She could hear her heart in her ears. _

"_Mom and…and Jacob?" she stuttered. _

_Charlie barked out a laugh. "Sounds crazy to you probably, seeing as it's history by now. Yeah, he was nuts about her. I was always rooting for him, too. Don't get me wrong, your dad's an all right guy, but back then I couldn't stand him. I had my reasons," he added sternly, as thought expecting Nessie to object. "Bells wasn't having any of it, though. Punched him in the face when he kissed her." He laughed again._

_A large chunk of canoe had come off in Renesmee's hand. She looked down at it with detached shock, even as her whole body started trembling. Jacob and her mother. Jacob loved her mother. _

_Jacob kissed her mother._

_She had to get out of the boat. She could barely think, but she knew that she was losing it. Whatever tenuous control she'd exerted over her monstrous self these past few months was snapping, and her grandfather was only a few feet away. _

_With a small splash Nessie threw herself out of the canoe and darted for the shore like an arrow, Charlie's surprised protests echoing unheard across the lake. She struggled through the shallows and emerged, dripping, at the edge of the tree line, ready to run to Canada for a private meltdown, if need be. In the one moment she paused and drew a breath, she saw him. He was walking toward her, pulling a shirt over his head and grinning in cautious welcome. _

"_Hey, Nessie. I heard you were out here with Charlie and I thought I'd come see if you wanted to go hunting or…why are you crying? What's wrong?" He sounded almost exasperated, like he was as tired of these pointless emotional outbursts as everyone and only grudgingly accepting his role as kiddie calmer. _

_She exploded. In that moment of bewildered teenage fury she had no idea what this letting go really meant, what dark things she was unchaining along with her hurt and anger. Her family could have told her, of course, but they had no idea she would ever need to know. She'd made sure of that._

oOo

"Beans and toast?"

"Oh, well…" said Fatima, suddenly looking rather shifty. "I thought you might like it, or be used to it or something."

Nessie grinned and lifted her fork. "Sure, it's great." When they started studying for the English exam, Fatima was going to realize very quickly that Nessie was _not_ British. "Where's your father?"

"Mosque," she said simply, turning back to the stove and heaping a second plate with food. "He'll be here soon." She sat down next to Nessie and shoveled some beans into her mouth, and they ate in awkward silence, forks scraping quietly on plastic plates.

They had barely finished when Nessie heard heavy footsteps on the staircase—Abdul was back. Fatima rose quickly to prepare a third plate and Abdul appeared in the doorway, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he smiled at Nessie.

"Good morning, Dorianne. I hope you slept well."

"Yes, I did," Nessie said, blushing despite herself. She felt so awkward being here, imposing on these strangers. She'd never interacted this extensively with anyone outside her family before, and sitting at their kitchen table in the intimacy of early morning made her distinctly uncomfortable. Abdul sat down in front of the plate his daughter had filled for him and began to eat enthusiastically.

"Papa, Dorianne agreed to stay and help me get ready for my exam. She speaks fluent English and I might not fail, now."

"Wonderful! Very kind of you, Dorianne. Fatima is brilliant, of course," he said, smiling up at his daughter indulgently, "but she hasn't left this country since she was a child and you really do need an immersion experience if you're going to master a new language. She's studying some very advanced English, considering her experience is only academic."

"Oh, well, I mean, it shouldn't be that hard," Nessie stuttered. "And, you've let me stay here and fed me and everything..." She was feeling, if possible, even more awkward than before. Why was she so socially inept? At least her parents had groomed her into eating human food_—_she could do that part just fine. But why didn't they teach her anything else? She felt so small and foolish, totally unprepared to deal with the world of normal people. They all did this so easily; she was the only one who couldn't carry a conversation or figure out whether she was supposed to pay the Debhis for last night or buy them a present, or if she should have turned Fatima down and left this morning because her offer was just a matter of form and she had expected Nessie to say no…

She was breaking out in a cold sweat over this stupid breakfast.

Eventually Fatima put a stop to her misery by asking if Nessie wanted to go with her to the market. Nessie said yes a little too quickly and almost knocked her chair over as she stood up. Abdul politely pretended she had done nothing strange, and Fatima went up to the attic to get her scarf. Moments later they set the bookshop bell ringing as they stepped outside into the morning sunshine, Nessie breathing deeply and feeling for the first time that day like she was on even ground.

"This way," Fatima said, gesturing to the left with the arm not clutching her satchel. There were a lot of people on the street for a Sunday, men lounging in doorways and on corners in groups, women in niqab holding tightly to their purses and their children, tall black women with bright shirts and intricately woven hair. As they crossed the street Nessie saw one man holding court in an empty, weedy parking lot, rapping to an audience of teenage boys. His head was bobbing slowly as he spoke, right hand slicing through the air in time with his words. Nessie looked an instant too long—he caught her eye and fell silent, looking her up and down. She stopped walking, daring him to keep staring. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Fatima stop and turn around, looking for her.

"Hey, white girl!" he called, and fifteen heads swiveled in her direction as the men around him turned to see who he was talking to. "What are you doing, walking around like you're not ashamed of anything? Whore."

Nessie bit back a snarl. Oh, if only she didn't have to pretend to be human...she could tear out his vocal cords and break every one of his fingers...

Fatima laid a hand on Nessie's arm and shook her head. "Keep walking," she said.

"Who was that?" Nessie asked, still fuming. "Does he say that sort of thing to everyone?"

"Oliver_—_I went to school with him. We used to say he was so angry because his mother gave him such a terrible name." Nessie just gaped. Did Fatima think this was funny? "Just ignore him if you ever see him again. He thinks he's going to be famous and he shows off for those boys all the time. Look, we're here."

And they were. For some reason, Renesmee had expected a very French outdoor affair of booths and cunningly displayed produce, but they were staring into the grimy windows of a crowded halal grocery store. Fatima turned to Nessie, eyebrows lifted. "Shall we go in? It won't get any better; it's always this crowded on Sunday." Nessie nodded and followed her inside.

They pushed their way through the entry of the tiny space into an aisle, and Fatima was just reaching for a package of flour when Nessie realized that coming inside had been a mistake. There were heartbeats hemming her in on every side, pumping thickly as the blood of so many people assaulted her nostrils in a tantalizing bouquet of flavor. She swallowed a rush of venom along with the sudden urge to whirl on the spot and sink her teeth into whoever was breathing on the back of her neck. She had to get outside.

But there were too many people. She would have to push her way out, touch who knew how many of them and press up against them in her fight to get to the door. She started to panic as more venom trickled over her tongue and her muscles began to coil for a spring. Was she really going to kill someone, right here? The neck of the woman standing in front of her was covered in heavy fabric, but she could imagine its outline as it fell to meet her shoulder, pulsing beautifully with liquid sweetness. In a split second her teeth were centimeters from the woman's throat and she inhaled that beautiful smell one last time before a very different feeling hit her in the stomach. She clapped a hand over her mouth and lurched away, pushing insistently at the crowd of women until they parted, her desperate eyes finally landing on the door. She knew what was about to happen. It had happened on a bus from Spokane to Detroit and in the shipyard in Spain. She threw the door open and ducked into an adjacent alley just in time to be sick all over the dirty pavement.

She sank down, shivering, next to her half-digested beans and toast with her arms curled around her knees. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and let her head fall back against a dumpster. This was never going to stop happening.

She should be grateful, really. If things continued this way she might never take another human life. She would rather puke her guts out than murder someone. It was probably some sort of psychological reaction, because whenever she got close enough to drinking she automatically remembered the most horrible day of her life and forgot being thirsty and just barfed instead. But it was so damned _disturbing. _After everything, after running so far away and trying so hard, she had almost killed that woman. She had _wanted_ to. Whether or not she threw up every single time she tried to drink someone's blood, she was still nothing better than a monster. She felt her eyes begin to itch and her lip start to wobble, but she refused to cry. She deserved every second of this.

She was always trying to forget what had happened, the way the bloodlust had crept up behind her when she was just a happy, naïve little child. But try as she might, she remembered every painful detail, every moment of terrifying, throat-burning frenzy that had stalked her since her first moment in that Port Angeles ballet class.

No one in her family had ever really worried about her hurting anyone; she was only a half vampire, after all, and she seemed fine eating human food and hunting animals. And she had been, for a while.

When she looked old enough to be about twelve, her family started talking about "socializing opportunities." She couldn't go to school while she was still growing like a freak of nature, but in Port Angeles, where no one knew her, she could go a couple times a week to dance class and it might be several months before anyone noticed how quickly she was changing.

Nessie found several holes in this plan, but the truth was they were all so desperate for her to interact with some girls her age that they would take a few risks to make it happen.

So, her mother bought her a leotard, a rehearsal skirt, and a pair of dance slippers and drove her to Port Angeles for her first day.

"Just have fun, sweetheart," she said, patting down a curl that had sprung free of Nessie's bun. "I'll be back in an hour." Then she kissed Nessie's forehead and walked back to the Volvo.

She'd been nervous, of course, but she really liked ballet. There were seven other girls in the class, and they were friendly and normal and told Nessie she had a pretty skirt (her mother had picked out a blue one with pink roses blooming all over it). She was good at ballet, too. She could point her foot perfectly and remember steps after only being told once. She was having a wonderful time, even though her throat had started itching while they were still standing at the barre. She swallowed a lot and didn't let it bother her. She could feel herself coming out of the unhappy funk she'd started falling into for no reason, could almost feel herself starting to smile.

But the itching got worse. Was she getting sick? Her throat was burning now, and she felt tense all over. All the sounds in the studio seemed amplified_—_the music, the creaking floorboards, the quick heartbeats of the other girls...

The heartbeats. All of a sudden the scent of so much blood in the room grew strangely appealing, and before she could stop herself she was wondering what it would taste like. So much better than deer...better than anything...

The girl doing _tendus_ in front of her was only a few feet away. Nessie found herself imagining what it would be like to bite through the skin of her neck into her jugular and suck like she was drinking from a straw until she'd lapped up every last drop. Her mind screamed at her to step forward and bite, and she faltered in the dance combination as her body almost obeyed. The teacher called her name and told her to get back to the steps, and the moment was broken. Nessie breathed frantically through her nose as she started dancing again, every inhale sending flames coursing up her throat. She was horrified at herself, and her body was shaking with the effort of staying in place when it wanted so badly to attack. What was happening to her?

She would never remember how she made it through the rest of that first lesson, clenching her teeth and concentrating as hard as she possibly could on her teacher's voice to remind her where she was. Somehow an hour went by and they were all curtsying and clapping and being shepherded out the door into the rainy Washington afternoon. Nessie broke from the other girls as soon as she could and ran to the parking lot where she knew her mother would be waiting. She wanted her mother so badly, wanted her hug and kiss and soothing voice to anchor her to the earth again after the nightmare of the past forty five minutes. When she saw Bella, though, leaning against the driver side door and looking like a runway model with her thick, glossy hair, golden eyes proclaiming her righteousness among vampires, Nessie's desire for comfort turned into a deep, bubbling shame. She approached her mother slowly and barely answered her questions about class as she climbed in the car and turned to look out the window.

Nothing changed once she got home and encountered all the other people she could have confided in. The confession stuck in her throat when her grandfather sat her down for lessons and when her father kissed her goodnight. They kept looking at her and smiling like she was the light of their blessed existence. How could she disappoint them? How could she tell them she wanted to murder a whole dance class full of innocent young girls? Cullens did not think that way, and she would rather die than tell any of them something so, so shameful. What would they think if they knew their golden child was really just another monster?

_You do not belong here. _The words spun relentlessly in her head when she woke up from nightmares of blood and mirrors and dead children. She didn't belong in her good, righteous, human-loving family, but she was desperate to keep them from finding it out.

She went back to the Port Angeles ballet class every Tuesday and Thursday, sick with dread each time. They would dance for an hour and she would swallow down the ever-mounting urge to drink from her classmates. One day, she knew, she was going to give in and kill them, and it terrified her. She was afraid to ask if she could stop going because she knew she'd be interrogated, and she couldn't lie straight out to her father. He would know.

Now, sitting in a dirty Parisian alleyway next to her regurgitated breakfast, Nessie realized for the first time the depth of her selfishness. She chose to risk the lives of all seven of those little girls (the teacher too, if she was being honest) rather than tell her family that she wasn't as perfect as they thought she was. She disgusted herself.

She stood slowly and took a deep, shaky breath. She'd been outside for a while and Fatima was probably nearly finished with her shopping, wondering where Nessie was. She covered her vomit with a piece of newspaper and walked back out onto the sidewalk to wait.

It didn't take long—Fatima emerged with three bags hanging from her arms and her hijab slightly askew over her right shoulder. "There you are!" She said. "I'm sorry I took so long. Did you just give up on me?"

"No, no, I'm sorry. It was just really crowded and I didn't think I'd be a lot of help, so I thought I'd come wait outside."

"Oh, well, we can go home now. I got everything I need." Fatima smiled and passed Nessie a shopping bag. "Shall we?"

They walked back to the bookstore side by side, Nessie numb to her companion's placid happiness.

oOo

"No," Nessie said tonelessly. "_A couple of times _is between two and three, _a few times _is between two and four. That's what your book says, too."

"Oh, right, right. I'm sorry, I just hate these English idioms. They don't make any logical sense."

"Yes, they do. A couple is, like, you know, two people..."

"So how come _a couple of times _can be three?"

"I don't know, it just can." Nessie slammed the cover of Fatima's english textbook closed.

"But that's my point. There's no real reason. I just have to memorize it all."

"Well, that's what everyone else has to do when they learn a new language. You might as well get over it." Nessie winced when she realized how uncharitable she was being, but she was tired of this. In the days since The Sunday Market Incident Nessie had found herself more depressed than usual (which was saying something). She wanted to curl up inside herself and never come out, but she got dragged out of the attic every evening to help Fatima study. She couldn't exactly say no, seeing as it was the only reason they were letting her stay in the first place, and she was being a pretty terrible guest otherwise. Sunday evening she had withdrawn to the attic and ignored Fatima's knock at dinnertime. When she got up later that night to use the restroom, she almost stepped on a cooling tray of couscous when she opened the door to the stairs. For the next four days Fatima continued to leave food on the top step and only knocked late in the evenings when she needed to study. Other than that, Nessie didn't leave the room and saw no one, not even Abdul.

"You're right," said Fatima, unfazed by Nessie's rudeness. "and thanks to you, I _am _learning and I think I'm going to pass tomorrow." She was watching Nessie cautiously, as though sizing up an opportunity. _"_I was thinking...would you be willing to come down to class with me tomorrow? You could sit in on my French Literature course and then we could study a bit more over lunch before I have to take my test."

Nessie knew what was going on—Fatima didn't need to study anymore. She was concerned that Nessie hadn't left the apartment and wanted to try to coax her outside. Nessie thought about resisting, but realized that she didn't have the energy. "Sure," she said unenthusiastically. "That would be great."

"I'll knock on your door in the morning, then," Fatima said, gathering her books.

Nessie nodded and headed for the stairs. She closed her bedroom door quickly and sat down by the window, staring aimlessly out at the twinkling darkness. Two hours later she hadn't moved, though her focus had shifted to the candle on the windowsill. Its little flame flickered in the still air, guttering slightly whenever Nessie exhaled. She lifted a finger and brought it close enough to feel the small ring of heat cast around the candle's wick, so ineffective compared to the light it was casting on the far corners of the room.

Fire was the one element a vampire needed to fear— the only thing that could truly end an immortal existence. Ripped apart, then turned, in the blink of an eye, into a foul-smelling pile of ash. She'd seen it happen once. Would she need to be torn to pieces, though? Her body was so much weaker...What would happen if she placed this candle to her shirt? Could it kill her, just the fire? She thought of Fatima and Abdul dousing the attic with buckets of water and finding her charred remains. Her fingers hovered closer. She wondered if her family thought she was already dead.

She sighed, dropped her hand, and climbed into bed, eyes blank and dry.

oOo

True to her word, Fatima knocked on Nessie's door early Friday morning and told her they needed to leave in an hour. Nessie rolled over and moaned into her pillow, wondering what she was supposed to wear to visit a class at a French university. She had tried to wash her jeans in the bathroom sink, but they hardly looked better for her efforts, and they were tighter than ever. She'd just have to look like a hobo in the fashion capital of Europe once again.

They left after a hurried breakfast of fruit and cheese (Fatima had thankfully given up on the beans and toast when she heard Nessie's American accent for the first time) and caught the metro into the heart of the city. It was a long ride, and Nessie was apprehensive about once again seeing the Paris she remembered, but when they reached their destination she forgot to be angsty. She'd never been to the Quartier Latin before.

She followed Fatima down narrow streets and open boulevards, into a building and down several long hallways to a lecture room half-full of people, about fifty of them. Nessie stopped in the doorway. She couldn't afford another session of bloodlust—she had no idea where the nearest restroom was, for one thing. She took a cautious breath and felt no answering ache in her throat. The students all seemed half-awake: their hearts were pumping sluggishly at a resting rate and the room was large enough that the scent wasn't overwhelming. Even so...

"Can we sit in the back?" she asked Fatima.

"Sure." Fatima pointed to a pair of seats just off the aisle by the door, and they slid in to wait for class to start.

The professor didn't take long to arrive. She was a short, beak-nosed woman with a severe bun and a shrewd gaze. She took a moment to organize her papers at the podium and gaze out at her semi-slumbering students before she cleared her throat and began speaking.

"Today, Musset," she said dramatically. "The great child of romanticism. His influence can _never_ be overexaggerated!" She leaned forward over the podium and peered out at her audience, as though one of them had suggested such excess were possible. Nessie shifted in her seat, intimidated despite herself.

"I have much to say on this subject, of course, but you must feel the power of these words if you are going to have any grasp at all of Musset's genius and his influence on every poet who came after him," She struck the podium for emphasis. "Simply reading these words, taking them in with your eyes, is _not _sufficient."

She paused and cleared her throat again. "_Tristesse_," she said reverently, and began to recite.

"_J'ai perdu ma force et ma vie,  
et mes amis et ma gaité;  
J'ai perdu jusqu'à ma fierté  
qui faisait croire à mon génie."_

Nessie stiffened in her seat. She did not want to hear this. The words turned her heart over with an exposing hand as though she were a rock lifted from a stream bed, all twisting, cringing ugliness open to the sunlight. The professor continued to recite the poem, eyes closed, voice resonant in the open lecture hall.

"_Quand j'ai connu la Vérité,  
j'ai cru que c'était une amie..."_

She wanted to leave. Fatima was simply listening beside her, completely unaffected. Her head was tilted slightly to the side as she considered the professor's words.

"_Dieu parle, il faut qu'on lui réponde."_

Aaaand she was out. On the word "God" she jumped from her seat and silently exited the building, her supernatural memory guiding her all the way to the metro and back to St. Denis. She did not need to hear about God.

With each step she took the words echoed in her head.

_J'ai perdu ma force..._

Step.

_et ma vie..._

Step.

_et mes amis..._

She didn't stop until she shoved open the door of the attic and sank down once again in front of the window. She leaned her head against the glass and breathed deeply a few times until she felt a little less panicked, and then she sat and drew patterns in the dust on the floor until the minutes started to melt together and she was able to forget the terrible poem in the numbness of monotony.

Some time in the late afternoon she heard the bell over the main door and knew that Fatima had come home. She wondered how Fatima had done on her exam, but couldn't bring herself to go downstairs and ask, and Fatima did not try to come up. Nessie was left alone all evening, to her great relief, to watch the sun sink and the darkness bloom in the attic as evening became night. She climbed into her bed and tried to fall asleep but she couldn't, and at some point after tossing about for a few hours she felt tears come and this time she let them, and she howled into her pillow even though she wasn't sure why, and when she heard footsteps on the stairs she didn't stop or try to pretend she hadn't been crying, and when she felt the mattress sink under Fatima's weight she lifted her head and let Fatima place a hand on either side of her blotchy, tear streaked face. A tear fell from Fatima's own eye as she locked Nessie's gaze and said quietly, "_Le seul bien qui me reste en ce monde est d'avoir quelquefois pleuré._"

And then she held her, and let her cry some more.

* * *

**A/N: **The poem in this chapter is "Tristesse" by Alfred de Musset. I absolutely suck at translating poetry, which is why I left it in French for the story, but I will attempt to give you a rough translation of the portions of _Tristesse _that I used, broken up like they're broken up in the chapter:

_The professor's first words:_

**Sadness**

**I have lost my power and my life**

**and my friends and my joy.**

**I have lost all up to the pride**

**that made believable my genius.**

_Her second phrase_:

**When I knew truth,**

**I thought she was a friend. **

_The bit that made Nessie leave her seat:_

**God speaks, one must respond to him.**

_And the last line of the poem, which Fatima recites:_

**The only good thing left for me in this world is to have sometimes cried.**

If you want to read the whole poem, just google it. It's everywhere.

Other references:

_Quartier Latin_- the neighborhood in Paris where most of the universities are located. Lots of fun jazz clubs. :)


	5. Chapter 4

"_Don't touch me! Don't come near me!"_

_She was shouting before she'd even thought to speak, her hoarse screams shattering the peaceful silence of the forest morning. She was still wet, dripping onto the rocks that tumbled to the shore, shuddering under the influence of something much more sinister than the chill._

_Jacob had frozen where he stood, eyes wide at the strength of her outburst. She had yelled before, of course, but not like this. The girl before him seemed transformed by her fury, a spitting water demon screeching incomprehensibly and pointing one shaking, accusatory finger._

_"You've been lying! All of you have been lying!" The words tasted so bitter in her mouth they burned her throat, venom trickling beneath her tongue._

_"Ness, what are you talking about?" His palms were raised in a calming gesture, his eyes still wide. He wasn't frightened of her. No one ever was._

_"Since before I was born...before I was _born..._" She couldn't breathe. She wanted to tear out his hair. She still wanted to run to Canada._

_He took one timid step toward her and she launched herself at him, teeth bared and fists clenched to make contact with his face. He grabbed her wrists and pinned her arms to her sides, gathering her into the orbit of his body. She bit him on the chest._

_"God damn it, Nessie!" He let her go and staggered back a few steps, hand pressed over the sudden bloom of blood. She hadn't done something like that to him since she was a toddler and her teeth much less sharp. She had his attention now._

_"How long?" she said, her voice low and deadly._

_Jacob was wiping blood off his torso with the back of his hand, staring at her like he'd never seen her before. "What?" he finally asked. She couldn't tell if his confusion was feigned or genuine._

_"How long? How long have you been in love with my mother?"_

_His mouth fell open and his hand stilled above his stomach. "What are you talking about?"_

_"Don't lie! Don't you dare lie! Charlie told me, Jacob. He told me everything and you're still lying to me..."_

_She dove for him again and he sidestepped her easily. She skidded to a stop a few feet past him, chest heaving. She was so far beyond herself that even that ever-present fear of losing control was gone. A small part of her brain noted with clinical interest that she'd arrived there, at that place she'd never wanted to find. She had no ability to care. They stared at each other for a brief moment before she took off running, knowing he would chase her, daring him._

_"Not this time." he growled from behind her, and she made it a few hundred yards before he tackled her and she landed with a soggy thump on the forest floor. He hadn't even phased, and he'd caught her. Always stronger. She staggered to her feet, threw her shoulders back, and glared at him._

_"I'm not in love with your mother," he said._

_"Then why did you kiss her?"_

_"I...that was a long time ago. I was a kid, and I had a crush on her..."_

_"You still love her. I know you still love her." Why wouldn't he?_

_"Yes, I still love her, but it's not anything like what you're.."_

_"Oh my god." she whispered, barely listening. Her stomach filled with ice. A horrifying possibility had just occurred to her—a reason why they would all have kept it from her, why Jacob was still with their family all these years later instead of with the pack, even though the woman he loved was married to someone else... "Did you," she swallowed, "did you imprint on her? Did you imprint on my _mother_?" She was screaming again. "And my father knows! He knows about it and he lets you...and does she...does she..." She trailed off, hyperventilating._

_Jacob was pinching the bridge of his nose, his eyes closed. "No," he said with an empty chuckle. "No, I did not imprint on your mother."_

_"You're still lying! There's no other reason. You're still in love with her, and what am I? What am I, Jacob? Her daughter by somebody else? You wish you were my father instead of him, don't you? Us being best friends, it's just...it's just to be closer to her!"_

_"I imprinted on _you_!" he roared._

_The silence that followed this pronouncement was deafening. It should have changed things, she realized later. Those words should have flipped a switch, stopped her cold, something. But in that moment, they didn't. Her fevered mind simply kept going, dove right over the cliff she'd been trying to cling to._

_He had imprinted on her? It only made her angrier. When it mattered, when he had a choice, he chose someone else. He chose her own perfect mother. How much must he hate her now, being tied to her, unable to even want the things he'd wanted before. Stuck to a child when he could have had a woman._

_"Well, I'm just really, really sorry I got in the way!"_

_"No, you don't have any idea what you're saying. It's not like that at all..."_

_She stormed off in no particular direction, shaking all over, venom almost dripping off her teeth. It sounded like he was following her again. Her muscles were tensing; she wanted to turn and attack him. She could hear her blood rushing in her ears._

_Blood._

_Blood pounding, not hers. Sweet, delicious. So good that everything (there were other things?) stopped mattering and she turned sharply left and she was sailing, flying almost through the air and racing into the most euphoric completion and she dove, and bit, and oh god it was so good and wet and endless and she drew and drew until the glorious flood weakened to a stream and she sighed and let the pleasure fill the tips of her fingers and the roots of her hair, the satisfaction so complete she was convinced she could never, ever want anything else again as long as she lived. She swallowed over and over, pulling every last, pulsing mouthful._

_She sighed, her heart finding its way back into her chest, and opened her eyes almost lazily as she reluctantly broke her mouth free from the depleted source of her sustenance. She blinked a few times as things swam into focus—a white, empty man with a beard lay before her, flannel shirt soaked in a riotous welter of blood. His eyes were still open, staring at nothing. Dead._

_What...what had just happened? She lifted her hand to touch her lips and they were sticky. She held her fingers out and saw them soaked in the same shockingly red liquid, felt it dripping thickly from the bottom of her chin._

_She had killed someone._

o O o

"You can't wear one of those."

Nessie untied the blue scarf she'd knotted under her chin and shook her hair out. "I wasn't going to, I was just looking."

"You were thinking about it," said Fatima as she dug through a bin of t-shirts, "I could tell. You probably ought to become Muslim first."

"I was just looking," Nessie said again, folding the scarf and setting it back on the precarious tower of fabric she'd found it in.

"Yes, well, you _looked_ like you were trying to be Turkish. Why were you knotting it under your chin like that?"

Nessie colored. "You can't expect me to know how to do it right unless you show me."

Fatima stopped digging through the bins and looked up at her. "You really want to wear one, don't you?"

Nessie shrugged. "I want people to stop looking at me."

"Lots of women here don't wear them."

"Yeah, well, none of them have curly red hair."

Fatima sighed. "Either you get looked at here, or you get looked at everywhere else, like me. It's one or the other."

_Not if I never leave . _"Okay, fine. I don't believe in being modest, anyway. "

Fatima rolled her eyes and went back to the t-shirt bin. "What are you, though? You've never told me."

"You mean, like, religion?"

"Yeah."

"Uh...Anglican, I think," she said, thinking of Carlisle.

Fatima burst out laughing. "Well, when you're sure, let me know. Did you get everything you wanted? I don't think I'm going to find anything else. We should probably just go home."

Nessie looked down at the cheap rayon skirt in her hand. What she really wanted was a new pair of jeans, but they cost eight euro more and she was running out of money.

"Sure, we can go." There weren't many people in the store, but she was starting to get a little tense and jittery anyway, just being in a confined space where she _could_ get in trouble if a bunch of people happened to walk in.

They paid and made their way outside, Nessie taking a big gulp of safe, clean air.

"Why do you always do that?"

"Do what?"

"Act like you just got your air supply back whenever we leave a building."

"I just like being outside."

Nessie didn't blame Fatima for giving her a skeptical look. She spent almost all of her time in the attic unless Fatima talked her into leaving. "I mean, when I'm not alone. I like being _alone_ inside or outside..."

When would she learn to stop trying to explain herself? She was the worst vampire in the world. Probably because she wasn't even a real vampire—the extra chromosome had ruined her for stealth and self-preservation. She blamed a lot of things on that extra chromosome.

When they got back to the bookstore Fatima took the counter for her father and Nessie went upstairs to count her dwindling supply of money, now seven euros smaller. She hadn't had a choice about spending it, though. Her jeans were done for. She could still get them on but she couldn't button them shut, and she'd been wearing her longest shirt for a couple of days to disguise this. Said shirt wasn't doing a very good job, so she'd dipped into her cash and agreed to go shopping with a slightly surprised Fatima the first time she was asked.

She threw her new skirt down on the bed and stared at it. It really was ugly. The fabric was cheap and unflattering, but her days of having a closet bigger than her bedroom were over. She was going to have to get very used to dressing like this.

She sighed and shoved her few remaining bills and coins back into her backpack. She'd been with the Debhis for almost a month now, and she was glad her money had lasted her this long. It stretched a long way when Abdul and Fatima kept refusing to let her pay for things, but she was going to have to find a way to get some more or she was going to have to move on.

She realized with a jolt that she didn't want to leave. Fatima was the first girl she'd ever really known or told things to or sat up late with. After that one horrible night when Fatima had found her crying, Nessie started letting Fatima into the attic every evening for hours at a time, to read or talk or drink bitter coffee that kept them up past midnight. They would lie on their stomachs across the bed with their shoes off, telling each other trivial things about their lives in French and sometimes English. They never discussed that first night again.

This new pull of friendship, so foreign to an isolated child like Nessie, was going to be hard to leave behind. She wasn't happy, exactly, but she'd found calmness here. Her head was no longer full of the desperate, wordless frenzy that had driven her this far. Wherever she went now, she would go with a different spirit. She didn't know if that was a bad thing or not.

That evening, all three of them ate dinner together. Nessie was getting officially sick of all the human food. She'd never gone so long in her life without hunting, and as she pushed the little chunks of meat around on her plate she imagined the blood that had once run through them, and how much better it would have tasted than these leftover bits of carcass. Suddenly, a wave of nausea threatened her stomach as she remembered when exactly it was she had last drunk blood, and her fork dropped with a clatter.

_Keep it together._

_"_I have a meeting tomorrow," Fatima announced, as though Nessie's fork had reminded her.

"Yes, my dear, I believe you've mentioned it," said Abdul.

Fatima sent her father a very intense stare, and he cleared his throat and said, "but perhaps you should remind us both."

"Yes, Dorianne, I don't think I've told you about it. I'm getting involved with _Ni Putes Ni Soumises."_

"Oh, no, you told me. It sounds great."

"I'm very proud of her," said Abdul, as always.

"Thank you Papa, but I'm concerned about you."

"About me, my dear? Why is that?"

Something was up. Both Abdul and Fatima sounded oddly formal, as though they had rehearsed this. She watched them in cautious silence as their dialogue continued.

"I'm going to be gone so frequently, and you don't have anyone else to run the store. There's no way you can take on so many hours yourself; you already work more than a full day even when I do help you."

Nessie snorted quietly. The French idea of a "full day" was very different from the American one. Carlisle worked so much he would have killed himself if he'd been mortal.

"I see what you're saying, Fatima, but there really isn't anyone I can hire. You know that."

"Oh, but what about Dorianne? She's already here, anyway, and she's so generous I'm sure she'd say yes if we begged her."

So that was it. Fatima was three steps ahead, as usual. She knew Nessie was planning on leaving.

"That's a wonderful idea! Dorianne, what do you think? Can you spend your days in an empty store, helping an old man sort his books? It would solve a number of problems for us. Fatima wouldn't want to give up this chance to be part of something so important, you see, and I wouldn't let her."

"I..." Nessie began. "I know what you're doing, and I'm grateful, but I have to be honest."

They both just looked at her expectantly. She was starting to get annoyed.

"I don't have a visa. I don't...I don't even have a passport, all right? I'm here totally illegally."

Abdul smiled at her, a small, kind smile that resonated somewhere she couldn't put her finger on. "There are higher laws, my dear."

And that was that.

o O o

Late that night, when Fatima had gone downstairs and Nessie was alone in the attic, she pried open her little window and crouched on the sill. In one swift motion she sprang, landing soundlessly on the next building, bounding from rooftop to rooftop in the urban half-darkness until the buildings began to spread out, and then she hit the ground and ran with all the force she'd been denying herself until concrete faded to dirt, buildings to trees, streetlights to stars, and she gave herself over to the animal scents swirling in the air and brought down a red deer twice her size and drank it dry.

It was still dark when she came leaping cautiously back, ears tuned to anyone who might see her framed against the pale glow of the street. A few stray cars roared past, murmurings of people still awake or talking while they slept rose from isolated windows, and then, strange and high in pitch, over and over, a whimper.

It was a person, not an animal, and the noise was so faint Nessie judged no human would hear it from more than a few feet away. But she heard it, and she knew beyond a doubt that someone was terrified. She dropped to a crouch and listened harder. It came from the ground five stories below, in the alley. Heavy breathing, tearing fabric...

She crawled forward like a cat and leaned over the edge. Below her, all the way down by the dumpster, was a woman. Her face was pressed into the outer wall of the building, and a huge man stood behind her with one hand against her head and one hand...

She had no time to think. She hopped onto the ledge that lined the roof and dropped like a stone, landing right beside them and knocking the man unconscious with one blow to the side of the head. As soon as he went down she sprang away again, but she couldn't quite jump high enough and had to scramble the last few stories of the opposite building, where she hid and watched the woman's chest rise and fall too quickly as her head turned left, right, looking for her invisible savior. Finding nothing, she stared down at the inert man for a moment and then ran, holding her torn dress together as she stumbled down the street. Nessie followed her all the way to the side door of an imposing public housing unit, and when the woman was inside and the door shut firmly behind her, Nessie took off for the bookstore and slid through the open window as the sky began to lighten over Saint Denis, falling into bed and hugging herself fiercely as joy and despair confused her.

* * *

**A/N:** Just one French note today:

_Ni Putes Ni Soumises -"_Neither whores nor submissives." It's a pretty awesome organization, and exactly the sort of thing Fatima would care about. Check it out, if you have a chance.


	6. Chapter 5

_She stood swiftly, holding her trembling, bloodied hand away from her body. The man's throat was torn open, blood everywhere...like the first kill of some reckless newborn vampire._

_She backed up a few steps and stumbled over a tree root, catching at the trunk so she wouldn't fall. She didn't want to look at the mess of the man before her but her eyes were glued there. His hair was brown and he had big, calloused hands and a few deep scars on his empty face. His eyes were brown like Charlie's._

_She had to do something. Run away? Bury it? There might be people. They weren't far from the lake and it was Saturday. Had someone seen her already? Her eyes darted around the clearing, ear tuned to every tree rustle, every insect's footfall..._

_She gasped when she saw black eyes glittering between the branches several feet away. How long had Jacob been standing there?_

_"Nessie."_

_"Jake, I..." He'd seen it. He'd seen everything. He was watching her now, the dead man at her feet, the blood all over her face. She started shaking as she tried to talk. "I don't know what happened. I was... I was running away from you and then something happened to me... I didn't mean to... I don't know how I..." The huge gulps of air she was taking didn't seem to be giving her any oxygen._

_His face was completely unreadable, stoic with all the command of his shape-shifting chieftain ancestors._

_"Just sit down. We have to take care of this."_

_She did as she was told, her legs folding beneath her like spaghetti. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jacob crouch before the dead man and pass a hand down over his eyes. Then he gently lifted the corpse and walked off into the trees. He came back a few minutes later without it._

_"It'll have to work for now. Come on." He hoisted her by the armpits and set her on her feet. He headed off again into the trees and after a few seconds she followed numbly, tripping after him and not caring where he was taking her._

_He wouldn't look at her. He wouldn't say anything. How disgusted must he be? He lived to stop this from happening. His genetic makeup was the preservation of human life from the very thing he'd just seen her do._

_There was still blood on her chest. No wonder he couldn't look at her. He would never look at her again. She had killed someone. That man...his family would never see him again...was this a nightmare? Let it be a nightmare..._

_They turned north and she realized he was taking her home. Home. Her whole family...oh god oh god oh god. Her father would know first. He would see the whole thing. Her mother... Alice... Carlisle. Carlisle, who had spent all his centuries and built his whole family on never letting this happen...she had _killed_someone...What would they say? What would they do? Oh god, oh god. She had never wanted them to know. She would never be their beautiful child again._

_As the house came into view she stopped in her tracks. Jacob paused as well and turned to look at her, bare chest rising and falling with his steady breathing. He was as solid as the earth below him and she had never wanted his love, his smiling acceptance more than at this moment when she knew she'd drained every chance of it with the blood she'd taken. He reached out to pick her up, lifting her carefully in his muscular arms. She wanted to curl into him but she'd get blood on him if she did. He was already still bleeding a bit from the bite she'd given him._

_He was so very warm. She listened to his heartbeat as he carried her the rest of the way home, circling round to the back door and setting her down gently._

_"Go clean up," he said, unfathomable expression still in place. "I'll let them know what happened."_

_She looked back at him, begging for something she couldn't put into words, but he just blinked. "Go on," he said. She opened the door and went straight into the little bathroom by the kitchen._

_The first thing she noticed when she looked into the pristine mirror over the sink was her eyes. They were puce—blood invading brown and making a deep, dead purple. It was worse than if they'd just turned red. Her face was white, lifeless against the blood covering her mouth and upper chest._

_She could hear Jacob talking in the dining room, but she tried not to listen. She turned on the faucet and dipped her hands into the tepid water, scrubbing her face, neck, and chest with all the brutal purpose she could muster. Some of the blood had congealed during the walk home, but most of it simply flowed with the water into the sink. There was so much of it._

_All her clothes were still damp from her impromptu swim in the lake, clinging and chafing. Her jeans seemed mostly clean but her shirt was still bloody. Could she scrub it clean enough to wear it in the dining room? Her family would still smell it, still see little stains of it that even she couldn't. She'd just have to walk in wearing it; a clean outfit wouldn't have made anything better, anyway. It was all done. Done and over. From that moment and for many months afterward, Renesmee would feel as though her life had ended when she committed murder, the door slamming resolutely shut on her destiny._

_"Where is she now?" Alice._

_"The bathroom, cleaning up." Her father. "She's having trouble coming out." There was a hard edge to his voice, and suddenly Renesmee was really afraid. She gripped the sides of the sink and closed her eyes. She had no mental energy with which to clear her mind, and no idea what to say when she faced them. She knew they would have questions, questions she couldn't answer._

_She opened her horrible purple eyes and took one last, deep breath, then opened the door and walked right through the kitchen to the door of the dining room. She paused on the threshold—her family was standing in a loose arrangement at the other end of the table, her mother and father at the head. Jacob was leaning against the doorway to the living room with his arms over his chest, watching._

_Renesmee stepped over the threshold and took her place at the low end of the table, brushing the polished wood with the tips of her fingers. She had been in this position so often in the past few months, the unwilling subject of an exasperated family meeting, standing at one end of the room with all of them looking at her from the other side. She made eye contact briefly with each of them for as long as she could bear. They all had similar expressions on their faces—lips compressed and brows furrowed in a mixture of astonishment and disappointment and...something else. They looked almost afraid of her._

_As so often happens, Nessie did not realize what reaction she had really expected until she didn't get it. Despite all her terror, deep down she had thought they might hold her, stroke her hair, tell her that they all had made mistakes... It was clear to her now that she'd been wrong, and anger began to rise beneath her shame, anger at herself for being so foolish and at them for failing her._

_Her mother spoke first._

_"Did you really do it? Did you really take someone's life, Renesmee?" Nessie recognized that her mother was begging, still hoping just like she was that all of them were dreaming. But this wasn't a nightmare, not at all._

_"Yes."_

_"Why?" she whispered, and her voice broke Nessie's heart. "What...what happened?"_

_"I'm sorry. Please, please believe me. It was an accident. I still don't really know what happened..._

_"You don't suddenly drink a human dry by accident, Renesmee," said her father. She wanted to crawl inside herself to hide from him. "This isn't new, is it?"_

_She tried not to squirm under his penetrating golden gaze. She couldn't hide it from him any longer. "No. I've been wanting to... for a while. But it really was an accident!" Despite her best effort, she felt tears itching at the corners of her eyelids. "I was really angry about...something..." she saw her father's eyebrows lift in recognition as her thoughts passed over her fury at Jacob, and the reason. "I was angry and I argued with Jake and then...it just happened. I didn't even think about it, it just happened. You have to believe me, please..."_

_"You are_ _not a newborn vampire, Renesmee."_

_"I feel like I am! You don't know, because I didn't say, but you should understand! You killed hundreds of people, dad! I don't see why this is such a big deal!"_

_Her mother's voice cut across her, sharper than she'd ever heard it. "Renesmee, you will not try to justify yourself that way. Do you think this is some kind of little discipline problem, like you sneaking out to go hunting in the middle of the night? I can't even tell you how ashamed I am of you right now. We raised you to respect human life above everything else. I don't..." she trailed off, looking more unsettled and alarmed than Nessie had ever seen her._

_"I'm not trying to justify! I'm just saying...he should know, you all should know..."_

_"Yes, and so should you," said her father. "You have been a part of this family since the day you were born. You know how to behave. You run the other way, you hold your breath, you do whatever you have to do to avoid being a murderer. That's what makes us who we are, and you've just disregarded all of it."_

_"I can't hold my breath!" She yelled desperately, crying in earnest now. "I can't! Did you just forget that or something, Dad? I don't know how to do any of this, and you've all killed people before...I mean, most of you have...I'm sorry, all right? I didn't want to kill him. I didn't mean to do it, but it was just one person..."_

_The injustice of it all made her so furious she couldn't even speak. Her own father had killed hundreds of people and been forgiven, and who knew how many people Uncle Jasper had killed, and Carlisle always forgave everyone even though he himself had never done anything wrong, but they weren't going to forgive her. They were all still just looking at her as though they had never seen her before._

_Fine, then._

_Fine._

_"You're all hypocrites! You pile all this stuff on me even though you couldn't do it when you were my age and you want me to be perfect and never hurt anybody because you're all just so perfect, aren't you? There are eight of you and there's one of me and you all want me to be the perfect baby you couldn't have but I can't do it and I don't even want to be a Cullen, anymore, if this is what it means!"_

_"You're well on your way," said her father, his eyes boring into hers as though he were willing her to understand him. "No one in this family kills without remorse, Renesmee."_

_Nessie rocked back on her heels at his words, too shocked to speak._

_"Stop this, right now," said Carlisle, stepping forward. "Renesmee, I think you need to go spend some time by yourself while we talk. There are logistical issues to take care of, and you need a moment alone. Go calm down, take a proper bath at the cottage and one of us will come get you in an hour. Then we'll decide what to do."_

_She wiped her cheeks furiously and shoved her way past all of them to the door. When she pushed past Jake she felt his hand ghost across her back, his fingers brushing down her arm as she passed him. She stomped to the front door, threw it open, slammed it with relish, and bolted for her house as fast as she could go._

_She left the cottage door standing open as she ransacked the closets. She was going to make them sorry. They would all be sorry. She grabbed a backpack from her parents' floor and threw open every drawer and cupboard, looking for cash. She didn't have much time. She stuffed a few shirts, a wad of bills, and her toothbrush into the backpack, and then ran with all her might to the edge of the Sound, dove in with her clothes on and the backpack clutched tightly to her chest, and scissor-kicked her way to land on the other side. The water was strong and fathomlessly deep and the horizon never seemed to come closer, but she knew she would get there and she pushed until she did. She crawled out, exhausted and freezing, with no idea how long it had taken her._

_Her scent was gone. When they found out she was missing they wouldn't be able to track her past the shore. She would make them sorry._

oOo

Something woke Renesmee a few hours after she had fallen asleep, though she could not immediately figure out what it was. Groggy and disoriented, she stretched and took a deep breath, then sat straight up in bed with a gasp, acrid metal and rubber burning her nostrils. She had woken up because she smelled smoke.

She bolted out of bed and ran down the stairs three at a time, ready to grab both Abdul and Fatima and drag them to safety, if necessary, but they were perfectly fine. They were standing shoulder to shoulder at the front window, watching a car burn upside-down across the street.

"Oh, good morning, Dorianne," said Abdul, turning to see her open-mouthed at the foot of the stairs, one hand still clutching the banister. "Did you sleep well? It's your first day of work, so I certainly hope so."

"What...is that a _car_, on fire?"

"Yes," he said, turning back to the window.

"But...why? What happened?"

"Well, someone introduced a new bill yesterday. Limits on remittances."

Nessie just looked at him. He seemed to think he had given her a perfectly reasonable answer.

"So, that's the reason there's a car...on fire...across the street this morning?"

"Yes, as far as I know. It's the sort of thing that would make a lot of people around here quite angry." He and Fatima were looking at the rising flames as though they were watching TV, moderately interested and a little entertained.

"People just burn cars when they get angry?"

"Young men do. Older ones like myself can't lift the jugs of gasoline very well. But yes, it is a...what is the English phrase..._national pastime _in France_. _You've heard of it, surely."

Nessie didn't think she had.

"There's too much money leaving the country, they say, going back to the rest of _Francophonie _when the economy here is so weak," said Fatima.

"So these men were sending money home, and now they can't..." Nessie said.

Fatima snorted. "_They_ weren't sending money anywhere. None of them have jobs, for a start."

"Then, why are they..."

"They want something more to hate," Fatima said bitterly. Nessie noticed that Fatima didn't seem as amused as her father as she looked out the window at the burning car. Her mouth was in a thin line, her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

"Yes, well, they might decide that discovering their intellectual heritage is the best way to challenge the current legislation, and in that case we must be open for business," said Abdul. "Dorianne, are you ready to get started?"

"Oh, uh, sure. Yes." She was still watching Fatima, who sighed and hitched her bag up on her shoulder.

"Have a good day, you two. I'm not sure when I'll be back."

"Be careful, my dear," said Abdul.

Fatima smiled. "You know I always am."

oOo

Learning to navigate the store did not take up a large portion of Nessie's thought space. It was boring, actually, but she nodded and smiled and pretended she needed more help than she did. Her mind was on the events of the night before. She still felt everything—the anger, the confusion, the adrenaline. Her heart hurt for the nameless woman and her humiliation, that torn dress... but it had felt so exhilarating to hit that man, to stop something bad from happening instead of being the bad thing that happened to someone else.

The truth was, the blind fury that had spurred her to run from her family and leave no trail had not lasted her past the Idaho border. It had burned out almost immediately and left behind nothing but a guilt so deep she couldn't even think of turning around, and the rest of her desperate journey had been fueled by a self-hatred that grew with every step she took. This morning, though, she realized that she felt better, just a little. It was like someone had placed a marble on the scale against her hulking transgression, and the momentary relief was wonderful.

Abdul was demonstrating proper methods of book storage. He probably cared a great deal about this, seeing as his books spent their entire lifespans here.

She could do it again. In a _cité _like this there was no shortage of evil—men raping women, killing each other, selling drugs and fighting with the police. In the brief time she'd lived here she'd seen the evidence of it, heard Fatima talk about it. There were more marbles everywhere...

Abdul handed her a list of inventory. She pretended to listen to his commentary on it.

Her father had done this. Those few years were his greatest and most haunting regret, but she didn't have to do what he did. She could do it right. She wouldn't kill anybody. She could learn from his mistakes, even if she'd never see him again.

And that was how Renesmee found herself on the roof of a giant housing unit at one o'clock the next morning, listening for crime.

There was a group of men in the building's front courtyard, lounging against the walls and passing cigarettes around, listening to music. She would sit here and watch them, and if they did anything wrong she had no doubt she could take all seven of them.

But they didn't, not really. Two of them got into a fight at one point, but that wasn't the sort of thing she'd had in mind. She watched them posture and joke and shove each other around while the muscles in her legs started cramping and her neck grew stiff.

_On doit bouger, bouger, bouger..._

Her classically trained musical senses wanted to smash their stereo to pieces. At least they weren't listening to some of the stuff she'd heard since moving here—all those songs about the creative ways you could kill the women you slept with.

When they started talking about a "hot teacher" she realized they were all teenagers (she was never very good at telling how old anyone was). They were trading boasts about what each of them would do to said teacher if they got her alone, and Nessie's lip curled up in disgust. One of them was smaller than the others, the loudest and brashest of them all. She watched him aping the older boys, slouching his shoulders, running a hand over his bald head every few minutes so that the rings on his fingers caught the light from the street lamps. All these little actions, these things they were doing and saying, were supposed to tell everyone around them that they were tough, intimidating, dangerous.

As a creature infinitely stronger than any of them could ever hope to be she saw it all for the artifice it was, but she wondered if human women bought it, if their hearts sped up in fear whenever one of these boys leered at them from across a parking lot. It was hard for her to imagine, as she looked down at them swaggering around, but she thought of the woman with the torn dress last night and she knew it was true, and that if her strength was taken away from her she would feel no differently.

When the last of them went inside a little before dawn, she gave up and hopped roofs back to the bookstore, where she slept for two and a half hours before she had to be up for breakfast.

The rest of the week didn't go much better. Despite the palpable unrest growing all around her (several more cars had been burned and a few windows broken), Nessie didn't manage to find a single act of violence in which to intervene. She was grumpy from not sleeping and feeling increasingly foolish as she prowled the Saint Denis skyline. She had thought this would be easier.

To complicate matters, Nessie had finally convinced Fatima to move back into the attic and share it with her. If she was going to stay at the bookstore, she insisted that Fatima get her bedroom back. It felt almost like having a sister, lying in the darkness together and whispering until they grew too drowsy to hold a conversation. Until Fatima grew too drowsy, anyway. Nessie would listen carefully for Fatima's breathing to even into slumber, and then she'd creep to the window and hope Fatima didn't wake while she was gone and notice she wasn't in bed. Fatima seemed to sleep quite soundly, but Nessie had already missed two different nights of scouting because she'd fallen asleep while waiting for Fatima to do so.

Work in the store did not grow more interesting, but Nessie spent so much of her time in a sleep-deprived coma that this turned out to be a blessing. She could dust shelves and organize boxes on autopilot. Once every day or so, the bell over the front door would tinkle as a customer came in, but Nessie had yet to use the ancient cash register once. Mostly she sat around and paged through titles in the back. She would have been in school still, if she hadn't run away. Reading North African literature made her feel a little better about her delinquency.

Fatima was gone during the day almost as much as Nessie was gone at night, between her classes and her meetings. When she came home in the evening she always looked a little impassioned, as though she'd spent her whole day listening to inspiring people talk about the nature of God and the rights of women (which she probably had). She didn't talk about it much—she told Nessie that some of her new ideas wouldn't be particularly palatable to her father.

"He's actually much more conservative than he seems," she told Nessie one day while they were both getting ready for bed. "I think he knows what I'm hearing, but I don't want to distress him so I just don't really talk about it."

"He ought to let you have your own ideas."

"And he does, for the most part, but I'm his only child, Dorianne. He can't help it sometimes."

"Yeah, I suppose." She watched Fatima tie back her hair and pull down the sheet on her pallet. There was daily evidence of just how much Fatima meant to her father. Every time Nessie saw him look at Fatima with fondness it made her uncomfortable, first because she felt empty and envious in a way she didn't want to admit, but also because it made her anxious. The weight of that kind of devotion was so very, very heavy. Who was this woman, snuggled under her blanket and staring at the row of photos she'd set up by her bed, who was strong enough to stand under it so peacefully?

"That's my mother," Fatima said, pointing at a grainy photo of a dark, beautiful woman who couldn't have been more than twenty. She was wearing a bright yellow dress and smiling toothily at the camera.

"She's so pretty."

"Isn't she?" Fatima said fondly. "I wish I looked more like her."

"How old was she when you were born?"

"I'm not sure, actually. She died having me."

Nessie swallowed and climbed into her own bed, an uncomfortable and familiar sensation rising in her gut. "I'm sorry."

"So am I. More than anything I just wish I could remember her. There were a few minutes when we were in the world together, you know? Papa says she even held me for a little while, and I don't even know what it was like..." she trailed off, eyes on her mother's frozen, happy image. "I'd give anything to have my memory go back to the very beginning."

_No, you wouldn't. You really, really wouldn't._

"What were your parents like, Dorianne?"

"Uh, they were just, you know, people. My mother read a lot and my father played the piano."

"That sounds nice."

"It was."

oOo

That night Nessie got lucky only a block south of the bookstore. She wasn't on a roof this time, but crouching in the shadow behind a dumpster while a scruffy-looking man stood at the mouth of the alley, muttering to himself and smoking. Her tired eyes followed the red glow at the end of his cigarette as it lifted and lowered methodically, leaving a trail of burning ash in its wake. She was keeping the alley safe, at least...

Footsteps materialized behind her and she turned her head to see a young man in a hooded sweatshirt pacing slowly toward the muttering man, who was still facing the other way, unaware of the other man's presence.

"You saw something yesterday, didn't you?" said the hooded man.

The man dropped his cigarette and whirled around. "Nothing I care about," he said nervously, taking a step back toward the open sidewalk.

With no warning whatsoever the hooded man stepped forward and grabbed him by the jacket, then shoved him up against the wall and landed a spectacular blow to his face. The man doubled over, holding his nose.

"You want me to kill you?"

He shook his head, blood dripping through his fingers.

"Well, I'm going to, asshole."

Nessie drew a sharp breath and stepped out from behind the dumpster. At the sound of her gasp the hooded man whirled around, but before his eyes could focus on her she pounced forward and backhanded him across the face. He fell immediately to the pavement and she scrambled to the nearest window ledge before the bleeding man could see her, trying to get as far as she could from the enticing smell of his freely flowing blood. He stumbled away with his hand still over his nose, needing no explanation for his freedom.

The hooded man below her was too still, arms akimbo on the floor of the alleyway. She had hit him too hard; she'd been caught off guard when he turned around. She very well might have killed him. Terrified, she dropped to the ground and crawled over to where he was lying. She reached one shaking hand to the side of his throat and almost laughed in hysteria when she felt a solid pulse there. She backed away and sat down across the alley from him, completely overwhelmed. She stayed there until her would-be murderer began to moan and move his arms a bit, and then she leapt one block north and went to bed.

It got a little easier after that. She learned where to wait and when to intervene, how to knock someone out without needing to fear she might have done them permanent damage. She caught a pair of teenagers busting open a parking meter with a screwdriver and pounced on them, dragging them out of the street to wake up behind a grocery store. She thwarted some drug deals and prevented one or two instances of vandalism. Once she landed in the middle of a group of men who had gotten their hands on two girls and contented herself with rendering them all unconscious, though she had wanted so badly to tear them to pieces.

Neither Abdul nor Fatima had noticed her night-long absences and no one she saved or attacked ever had enough time to get a glimpse of her face. She was totally anonymous, and she could do this for a long time.

She only hoped it would be long enough.

* * *

A/N: I'm sorry this took so long. This thing was like The Chapter That Would Not Be Written, no matter how hard I tried.

French stuff:

_On doit bouger_- "gotta move" essentially. I looked all over the internet to find the title of this song and couldn't, but it does exist, I promise. :)

_Francophonie- _The french-speaking world, including North Africa, Quebec, parts of the Caribbean, etc.


	7. Chapter 6

_ It was Edward who went to retrieve his daughter a little less than an hour later, when the corpse had been taken care of and Jasper and Jacob dispatched to verify the man's identity. He made his way through the darkness of the trees at human pace, letting the afternoon rainfall wet his hair and face. For the first time in years, he had more to think about than his mind could process at once._

_She was hurt and angry, he knew. She had cherished a thought that they wouldn't be upset with her, but there was so much she didn't understand. He remembered with grisly clarity the visions that had surfaced in Bella's mind when they first saw their daughter with those startling purple eyes and blood on her blouse—nightmarish images, dim with her humanity, of a towering pile of ravaged bodies and a little boy with ruby eyes atop them, a little boy whose hair turned long and curly, whose eyes turned purple in a too familiar face... and then the vision had died like a snuffed candle. She closed her mind to him so rarely that it disturbed him almost as much as his daughter's appearance._

_But he had only needed that short, unchecked moment to know exactly what Bella was beginning to fear. What did they really know, after all, about this strange new race they had created? Very little._

_And then Renesmee's thoughts. Panicked, defensive, uncomprehending. The unfairness of her situation played like a loop in her frantic mind, her anger growing with every word they said._

This isn't fair... it was just an accident...it's no big deal...

_The fact that she had managed to hide something like this from him so completely was the most disturbing element of all. She had been feeling the bloodlust...well, he didn't know how long. He was questioning everything, now. Possibly it began in those first days when her behavior began to change, when she started to lash out at all of them for something as simple as a hand on her head or a suggestion about her schoolwork. Months. Months of sinister thoughts and physiological reactions, and he'd had no idea._

_How had she kept this from him? What else had she buried beneath so much falsely innocuous chatter? He had been so certain that there was nothing he didn't know about his child. Her mind had grown confusing, yes, but it had hummed along and opened to him whenever he delved into it, crystal clear always with love and fear and intelligence and frustration._

_But she had been lying to him. He could almost have admired the mental agility required if he hadn't been rocked to his very foundations._

_When she had slammed the door after their terrible interview and Edward had lifted his head from his hands, his eyes had turned immediately to Jasper._

_"Tell me she felt it."_

Oh yeah_, said his brother to him alone, _like you wouldn't believe. I know it didn't sound like it, and she probably wasn't thinking about it all coherently or anything, but... _and he began to radiate a shocked remorse and self-hatred so crushing that some of them gasped, and Edward's dead heart broke open even as relief flooded him, and he and Bella looked at each other, her beautiful mind wide before him once again._

It's fine_, they told each other. _She's still our girl. It's fine.

_And now he would go get her. They would fix this, somehow. He was her father; fathers fixed things._

_But she wasn't there. The door was open, her bedroom drawers turned over, but she was gone. He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. She had done this before, and every incident frayed his parental nerves just a little bit more. One of these days, something was going to happen to her. Oftentimes they let her come back when she was ready, after her volatile temper had cooled and reason had a chance to prod her home a few hours or a few days later. This time, he decided, he would go after her. It was possible she was more out of control at this point than she had been before she killed that man. She would need him, so he breathed her in and sprinted east. There was no doubt he would catch up. He was easily five times faster than she was._

_He followed her scent—that singular combination of flowers, blood and earth that was the union of her parents' bodies—through the trees for miles and came to the edge of the yawning gray water at the same moment he heard Alice call from somewhere behind him._

Edward!

_He stared at a sailboat rocking gently in the Sound as he waited for his sister. Her mind was an overwhelming cascade of visions, hundreds appearing at once as though the dam through which her sight trickled had burst and flooded her. Rosalie taking down a buck, Carlisle in his study, Esme sanding a cabinet, Emmett and Jasper wrestling. They kept coming, rich in the certainty and detail so long denied by that thread of their family that hindered her gift._

Edward, I think...I think she's really gone.

oOo

The bell over the shop door tinkled quietly, but Renesmee didn't get up from the floor of the back room. It was Fatima, she knew, home eighty-five minutes after her Thursday class was over. Fatima's footsteps echoed with startling force across the shop and she threw open the storage door and dropped her bag with an angry flourish.

"What's wrong with you today?" Nessie asked, turning a page of her book.

Fatima sighed. "I ran into Oliver and his goons on my way home. He has a new _song_."

"How many pieces is his girlfriend in this time?"

Nessie raised her head when Fatima didn't immediately respond to see Fatima staring at her with her mouth open. Then she threw her head back and laughed so hard she started sliding down the wall.

"Was it that funny?"

Fatima just kept laughing, nodding her head and wiping tears from her eyes.

Nessie smiled. It felt unexpectedly fantastic to have someone appreciate the darkness of her humor. She'd had thoughts like that (in her own head) for years now, but for some reason none of her irreverent quips had seemed right to say out loud. She grinned a little wider, pleased with herself.

She probably should have been worried about Fatima, actually. Things in the neighborhood were getting worse—rock throwing and rioting and some fights with police. This new role Fatima had found for herself gave her fierce purpose, but Nessie was noticing lately that it also gave her a sizable burden of guilt when anything in the world continued to go wrong. She'd been too quiet for the past few weeks, almost sullen. Now, recovering her breath and clutching at her stomach, she looked like a young woman who didn't know if she should be laughing, crying, or screaming.

"When you've calmed down...is it time for dinner?

"Yes...yes it is...want to help me?" Fatima picked up her bag again and nudged open the door.

"Uh... I don't know how."

"Sure you do. I'll show you."

Nessie shrugged and put her book away. "Okay."

In the end she didn't have to cook anything; she just chopped the onions. Fatima handed her a board and knife and three huge spanish onions, and then lit a candle and set it down by Nessie's hand.

"For the tears," she said.

Nessie picked up the knife and cut one onion straight down the middle, letting the husk flake off in her fingers. She wondered, as she turned the onion over and peeled off every clinging bit of brown, if the closer layers—the moist, sharp, white ones—would turn dark and snake off if you exposed them long enough, if inner layers became outer layers when left in the sun.

They worked in silence, Fatima warming something in a pan while Nessie chopped slowly, unsure of proper technique. A pleasant sizzle began to rise in the little kitchen as Nessie finished the last onion. She blew out her candle and Fatima looked up at her.

"Done? You can just toss them straight in here," she said, pointing at her pan. Nessie lifted the unwieldy board piled high with onions and carried them over, dumping them in with one flick of her wrist.

"Thanks," said Fatima.

"It smells really good."

"Onions and garlic usually do."

"So," Nessie said in her best Causal Voice, "what's going on, you know, out there?" she waved her hand at the kitchen window.

Fatima sighed, eyes on her pan. "Nothing out of the ordinary, I guess. Just people being loud and violent to make a point and undermining all of us to do it. It never bothered me so much before, but I get so angry now that I can't even _think _about anything else."

"I'm sorry."

"So am I. I want to live to see this done for, Dori," she said, her eyes hard. "Every last stupid, cruel thing. But I won't."

Nessie didn't have the heart to tell her that even as an immortal, she didn't think she'd live to see it, either.

Fatima looked up and must have caught the despair in Nessie's expression, because she said, "Oh, listen to me, sounding like the voice of doom. I'm sorry. Have you heard about the angel?"

"The what?"

"I've overheard three different conversations about it this week," she said, turning down the heat on the stove. "People think there's this _ange des ombres _saving people from criminals. No one ever sees it, it just...saves them and disappears."

Nessie re-instituted the Casual Voice. "That's really strange."

"Yeah, I have no idea if it's true or not, but there's a girl who swears it saved her from getting dragged into somebody's car the other night. They're saying that before she even tried to scream, the guy's windshield was broken and his face was pressing down on the car horn. He was totally knocked out, but she hadn't seen a thing. She'd barely blinked."

Nessie tried not to smile. That one had been awesome.

"So she wrote _violeur_ on the side of his face with her lipstick, and then she went home."

Nessie laughed. "That's perfect! Weird, though. There's no explanation?"

Fatima tilted her head. "No, not yet."

They looked at each other for a few seconds.

"Anything else I can do?" Nessie asked.

"No. No, I think we're almost ready."

"Great." Nessie smacked the counter with her palm and headed downstairs to close the store, telling herself that not even Fatima was that perceptive.

oOo

It didn't occur to Nessie until later that night, as she sat perched on the roof of the grocery store, that Fatima had said nothing about the carjacking or the murders. She had to have known about it, but she hadn't said a word. Maybe she figured Nessie already knew, and didn't want to bring it up. Or maybe in Fatima's mind such things were in a different category, the routine violence married to poverty. As far as Nessie was concerned, however, it was a lot more worrying than the riots.

It was worrying because Nessie had never seen it happen. By now she knew this district like the back of her hand, and she had thought nothing happened on the street in St Denis at night that she didn't know about. But a week ago someone had been killed and their car stolen, and then two mornings ago she had woken from her usual three hours of sleep to hear that two men had been shot at opposite ends of the neighborhood. After breakfast that morning, she went back upstairs and cried for half an hour until her shift started.

She did strange things like that a lot more often now that she was barely sleeping, and once again she found herself bitterly hating her body's limitations. No one else in her family would be unreasonably emotional, because none of them needed to sleep at all. Alice would have known exactly who would be killing who, and her father could have stopped every single one of them, across town or not, in about ten seconds. Nessie could stick her hand in somebody's face and show them something disturbing, but that was about it. And here she was, half-vampire and whole nothing, parading around like she had enough power to protect the innocent. _Sorry, everyone, you'll have to take the pseudo-hero. The professionals are otherwise occupied_. The people around here got the crap version of everything, apparently.

She could have stayed on top of the grocery store and indulged these self-pitying thoughts until sunrise, and she probably would have if she hadn't heard a car door slam and several pairs of feet head her way from down the block. She flattened and waited motionlessly for them to pass. They stopped a few yards away, in front of the hair salon next door.

"Where d'you think you're going?" said a voice. "This isn't over."

"I'm going home because it's bad information and you're wrong. I didn't say anything."

There were five of them, three on two. The two accused men were backed up against the wall of the building next to the grocery store, one defiant and the other clearly nervous. The other three stood shoulder to shoulder on the pavement, gold chains on their arms winking at her in the headlights of the car still running down the street.

"Oh, I think you did, though. We all do. We think both you scumbags decided you could get a better deal from the cops than you get from the boss."

"That's shit, asshole. How stupid would we have to be to cross the _boss_?"

The man on the far left laughed, his smile wide and frightening. "No worries, man. I know how stupid you are."

And then it all happened so fast she didn't even have time to jump to the ground. The one against the wall who had been arguing opened his mouth for another ill-considered retort, but he never made it. The rapid, echoing bursts of machine gun fire tore the night's silence and both men jerked horribly and fell to the pavement and Nessie still hadn't moved, and the three others ran for their car with weapons in hand and peeled away as the pools of blood below her fanned out into the street and trickled down the storm drain.

oOo

She walked home. There was nothing else she could do, but she felt terrible for whoever was going to have to see the bloody mess in the morning. Why hadn't she seen their guns? They were _assault weapons_. Where were these guys getting assault weapons in Paris? If this was how they were all going to kill each other, she couldn't stop them.

She was in her bed, she realized. She didn't remember getting there. Fatima was lying on her stomach with her arms splayed and dangling off the edge of her pallet, breathing softly. Nessie rolled over and tried to close her eyes, but she saw the whole thing over and over again...

Exhausted beyond reason, she eventually fell into a strange, nightmarish half-sleep where murders ran together between biting and shooting and her mother kept trying to touch her face, and then her mother was Fatima and she was waving an AK-47 at Oliver, and all his friends were dancing...

And when Fatima woke her thirty minutes later, Nessie had an idea.

oOo

"Abdul, would you mind closing up on your own if I left a bit early this evening?"

"Why? Have you joined up with Fatima?"

"No, no, I just have some things I need to buy, some personal items." She hated lying, but she had learned from the men in her family that no one asked any questions when they thought feminine products might be involved.

"I'll be fine, of course," he said hastily. "I only scheduled both of us for this afternoon because tourist season is coming up. Just want to be prepared. You go right ahead."

Nessie thought he was being a little optimistic, as it wasn't even April, but she just smiled her thanks and picked up her backpack. "I might be late coming back. Don't worry about me."

"I will in any case, my dear. Be careful."

She laughed awkwardly and pushed open the door.

Oliver was usually to be found within a few blocks of the bookstore, holding court in an empty park. She circled carefully around the neighborhood, determined to see them all before they saw her and started jeering. When she turned down the Rue de Falla she spotted them, grouped lazily at the other end of the street under the fledgling shade provided by a clump of trees in early spring bloom. She stepped into the bushes beside the pavement and searched all the faces turned in her direction. She was looking for a certain set of features she remembered from last night. She had seen them once before, that first day in St. Denis when she had attracted Oliver's unwanted attention with her staring. All his friends had turned to look her over, too, and one of them had a gold incisor and a disturbing smile, a disturbing smile she'd seen last night from a similar angle. She knew it had been him. But was he even here? Did murderers hang out a few blocks from their crime scene the day after they'd killed someone?

She inched forward a few feet to get a better look at the few men whose faces she couldn't see, and there he was. She felt a thrill of nervous electricity as she looked at him, leaning against the iron fence with his cap in his hand. He really was there, just standing there like a normal person after turning two people to swiss cheese the night before.

Did he have a gun now? She couldn't tell from here. She would just have to wait and follow him. After dark, he would either go home or he'd go wherever it was his "boss" worked and handed out assault rifles for his employees to tote around the suburbs.

As she watched the darkness grow around the knot of men she was amazed anew at their ability to do absolutely nothing for such a long period of time. It was like an art, almost, and the boys in this neighborhood did it better than anyone she'd ever seen. They finally dispersed a few minutes after midnight, and Gold Incisor went north with a couple of the others.

Nessie had never stalked anyone before, but she managed fairly well. She stayed a few hundred yards back in the shadows and followed the three men down streets and through parking lots, flattening against a car or building if any of them turned around. When they went inside a residential building and didn't come out again, she kicked the gate and went home.

The next day she worked until closing but left before Fatima could come home and make her stay for dinner. She found the boys in the same spot as the day before and she and hung back, once again, in the bushes until they went their separate ways.

This time he went alone, and he went the opposite direction. She tried not to hope for too much as she trailed him, but she was burning to do something about all this madness and if he led her into the middle of it himself, so much the better. He was walking more briskly than the night before, footsteps echoing in the darkness while her careful steps made no sound at all. Whether he was hurrying because he was alone or because he had somewhere urgent to be, she couldn't say. They hadn't gone more than a mile when he stopped in front of an old, empty warehouse, looked left, right, and behind him, and then jumped the gate and disappeared behind a side door.

Nessie was torn. She had landed atop this very building multiple times during her evenings out, and she'd never heard or seen anything suspicious. Following him inside might just be a disappointing waste of her time, and she risked being seen. She'd never know if she didn't check, though, and this was the reason she'd followed him in the first place.

She crept around the building, examining all four of its dilapidated faces, and found a broken window a few stories up on the east-facing side. She could probably jump most of the way there without making any noise, but if there were too many of them in there, and they _did_hear her...

At that moment a service truck came rumbling down the street and turned into the warehouse loading dock. That decided it for her. She had to see what was going on. She crouched and sprang, landing just left of her intended window. She shimmied sideways and peered in.

There were, well, a lot of them. Twenty, it looked like, and they were working on cars, feet sticking out from underneath engines or backs bent, rummaging in their open hoods. The smell of oil and gasoline wafted to her sensitive nostrils, mixed with overheated blood and perspiration. She felt a flash of disappointment; nothing even slightly illegal was going on. This was ridiculous, spying on a bunch of auto repairmen, even if one of them did happen to be a murderer. Where had he gone, anyway?

She spotted him at the corner of the warehouse, but not before noticing the teenage boy crouched in front of a windshield with a razor blade. He was removing the car's VIN.

There was no way that could be right. She decided she was still interested, leaned forward a little further.

The service truck had backed in from the loading dock and shut off its engine. Three men jumped out and slammed the doors, and all the heads in the warehouse swiveled in their direction. They shook hands with Gold Incisor and began a quiet conversation that the other men apparently couldn't hear, because they all bent right back to their work. Nessie strained to pull the soft voices out of the din below her and realized they were speaking a language she didn't know. It had a lilt that reminded her of her cousins in Alaska.

"They say that they are only leaving you with half."

"No. We have a deal. You pay up and you do it now."

More of the rapidly spoken foreign language... she wished someone had thought to teach something Slavic. It suddenly seemed incredibly useful.

"They say that it is you who breaks deal. They see these cars..." He waved his hand at the scene before him. Nessie noticed that he had sunglasses on. "These cars not even half what you say you give in one month. They leave half because they decide to be generous."

Gold Incisor looked like he wanted to pick up a rifle again, but he just gritted his teeth and said, "You tell them I can make bigger trouble than they want, if they pull this again. We'll fill our order, and you'll owe us with interest, got it?

The man in the sunglasses translated this last bit of bravado and the other two men nodded. One of them unlatched the back of the service truck and lifted the door with one great tug, and Nessie almost gasped out loud.

There were guns piled inside it from floor to ceiling. Everything suddenly made sense—the spoils of the Soviet Union arming every kid in the district, the stolen cars, the murders...

She'd seen everything she needed. She made sure she'd forced open the broken window all the way before she scaled the warehouse and leapt home in her usual fashion, a reckless but strangely alluring plan forming in her mind.

oOo

"Fatima, have you guys ever had a car?"

"Ah, no, I don't think so. Not since I was very little. Why?"

"Just wondering...all the people driving around here but no mechanic. Seems strange."

"Oh, there's one about ten minutes from here. That's where most people go."

"Huh... Well, I'm going out."

"Where? Do you want me to come with you?"

"Oh, no, just walking. I'll be fine, you stay here."

Fatima waved at her lazily from her pallet. "Enjoy."

oOo

"Abdul?"

"Yes, my dear?"

"What's the policy on days off?"

"I don't have one. You say you don't want to work, I don't make you. Very civilized."

"What if I didn't want to work on Tuesday?"

"Then I wouldn't make you."

"That's quite civilized."

Abdul inclined his head. "I told you so."

oOo

Sneaking into the warehouse in the middle of a sunshiny spring morning was going to be a lot more complicated than spying from a broken window in the middle of the night. It was her only chance to find the place unoccupied, though, and she had to take it. She tied her eye-catching hair back in a black scarf and put the bookstore's screwdriver in her backpack, next to the precious little bottles she'd managed to get her hands on. She acted as normal as possible walking down the street (which of course made her feel ten times more conspicuous, and probably look it, too), and took advantage of the thick bushes growing on the west side of the warehouse compound to pause before setting into a sprint she knew no one would be able to see. She ran full-speed up the side of the building and pushed through the open window without slowing down. She grabbed at a pipe that buckled with her weight but held her. She caught her breath, dangling over the empty warehouse floor, and listened for a heartbeat besides her own as she hung by one hand. Hearing nothing, she dropped to the ground.

Seven cars were sitting in a row, smelling of fresh oil. Their VINs had all been removed and they were clearly ready to be transported tonight. To her great relief, they all looked as old as she remembered them. If they'd been newer models, she might not have known what to do.

She punched in the driver-side window of a white Fiat and unlocked the door, brushing the glass off her arm. She unscrewed the well cover and set about stripping the wires, breathing a silent thanks to Jacob as she did so. Once she had it running she could...

Wait. She was going in the wrong order. She climbed back out of the car, fingers shaking slightly with adrenaline, and fished around in her backpack for one of her little bottles. They'd been hard enough to get—she'd had to count out all the money that was left after she helped the Debhis pay the rent, and then find the auto store and get hold of the substance without really knowing how one said "sodium silicate" in French. In the end she just told the clerk she needed something to seal caps and he'd brought it out from the back and taken her money. She'd only been able to buy four bottles of it with all the cash in her backpack, but she would get paid again next week and what she'd purchased should get her a long way.

She wrenched open the Fiat's hood and said another silent prayer of thanks, this time to her Aunt Rosalie, as the proper repository for her silicate presented itself immediately. She poured in what looked like a good amount (she had no idea how much she needed, really), and climbed back into the car to finish hot-wiring. This had to work. Please, please let it work.

The dashboard lit up and the engine revved to life a few seconds later, and Nessie scrambled into the seat and floored the gas pedal, watching the needle climb until some truly terrible noises began and the whole thing gave out for what was, unquestionably, the last time.

"Yes!" she yelled, laughing and bouncing in her seat. She'd done it. All the other cars should be just as easy, and when Gold Incisor and his murdering friends showed up tonight, they would find seven cars that would never be driven anywhere again, not even onto a loading truck for transport.

oOo

She was exhausted by the time she got home, and covered in engine grease. The other six cars had _not_been quite as easy as the first one, but she'd killed them all eventually. Her stomach was rumbling, too; she'd missed lunch. She crept back into the bookstore by the storage door and climbed the stairs to the attic to change before Abdul saw her.

"Dorianne?" he called from the front. "Is that you?"

"Yes, I'll be out in a minute," she yelled back, wincing. She closed her bedroom door and stripped out of her blouse and skirt, tripping over her shoelaces. She steadied, straightened, and caught a glimpse of herself in Fatima's closet mirror. There was a black smudge on her right cheek and some warehouse dust coating her calves and ankles. She stepped around her trundle bed and stood directly in front of the mirror in her underwear, fascinated. She hadn't looked at her body in a very, very long time.

As a child Nessie had spent a lot of her time without clothes on. Her poor mother had worked as hard as she could to instil the necessity of decency, but even at four years old Nessie sometimes changed clothes in her bedroom without thinking, doors and windows all wide open, or stripped outside to swim naked and then came home that way because she didn't want to get her clothes wet. She had just never really understood why it mattered, and figured no one would see her.

Since moving into the bookstore, however, she'd only had her clothes off for the briefest of moments in the morning and the evening, as she and Fatima both tried to change from clothes to pajamas and back again while spending the smallest possible amount of time undressed. She'd even learned to take off her bra without removing her shirt.

Now that she was alone and could actually look at herself her own body surprised her. She had noticed a bit of widening in her hips, how her hand had something to rest on now when she placed it there, but the curve of her body was much more dramatically different than she would have expected. She lifted one hand above her head and shifted her weight. If she pulled down her hair and fluffed it around her shoulders, she looked like a painting. Like a woman.

Unbidden, the thought of Jacob entered her head for the second time that day. She imagined him seeing her right now, like this, and flushed. In her mind his black eyes swept her whole body and the look in them made her lightheaded; her stomach squirmed as she trailed a hand from her shoulder across her breast. She felt powerful and weak at the same time, weak in a beautiful and delicious way that made her face heat up as in her imagination he was still so much older, knew so much more about these things she didn't understand...

Her hand trailed down her stomach and she snatched it back, almost frightened at herself. She found her other blouse on the floor of the closet and dressed hastily, back to the mirror. When she came downstairs a few minutes later, there was still a smudge of grease on the right side of her face.

* * *

Notes:

_ange des ombres- _angel of the shadows

_violeur- _well, that one should be fairly obvious.

I did not have to make up the weapons trade between eastern Europe and suburban France, unfortunately. Many thanks to my insightful readers- minor edits you will find in the last chapter can be credited to their wisdom.

Until next time!

Foi


	8. Chapter 7

That Spring was one of the warmest Paris had seen in many years. The boulevards were green and filled with sunshine, gardens flowering as terraced cafes came back to life. Knots of early-season tourists wandered back and forth on the Champ de Mars, seemingly bewildered at their spectacular good fortune in being somewhere so beautiful.

The brightening weather had less of an effect on Saint Denis, where an unspoken tension kept the sunny streets empty of passersby. Like most everyone else Renesmee was inside, dusting a crammed shelf of books and sending spiraling eddies of motes into a sun-caught cloud above her head. Dust managed to accumulate in the store much more rapidly than she would have believed possible, and wielding the duster was one of her least favorite chores due to its constant savor of futility.

She paused when she heard footsteps tramping heavily down the stairs. Fatima appeared with her satchel in hand, dressed to go out.

"Dori, you look terrible." she said, frowning.

"Well, thanks."

"You know what I mean. You've been like this for weeks. You have to tell me what's going on."

Nessie sighed and set down her feather duster. "Nothing's going on. I'm just having a hard time sleeping."

Fatima sneezed. Nessie waved her hands ineffectively at the dust cloud surrounding their heads.

"I know that feeling," said Fatima, sniffling. "Did I tell you I ran into police barricades when I tried to get to the pharmacist this morning?"

"What? No! Do you know why?"

"No idea. Maybe they're still just skittish after last week."

Nessie hoped that was all there was to it. Most of what had occurred since debate began on the remittances bill had been dismissed as a matter of course, the sort of unrest that's always present at one level or another in the ghetto. Last week, however, someone had set fire to a housing unit, and when the police and firemen finally got there they found fifteen or twenty angry teenagers ready to meet them. Rock throwing, fighting, and a bit of shooting had ensued as the building burned, and one cop, four boys, and twelve bystanders trapped inside had ended up dead.

Nessie would never understand why everyone insisted on conducting all the large-scale violence during the middle of the day, when she could do nothing about it. It made her want to throw things, and as she looked through the dust-dancing air at Fatima's weary countenance she appreciated for the first time just how helplessly furious her friend must always feel, walking through life with such a strong mind and such skinny shoulders. She wondered for a moment if she could even the scale just a little by securing Fatima an AK-47. She smiled at the picture in her head—Fatima the scarfed Goddess of Justice, staring down the barrel of a gun at any chauvinist who dare defy her...

"...so I left it on the stove, since I know you two won't be eating at the same time, anyway. You're going jogging again this evening, right?"

"Yeah, I was planning on it."

"I'll be honest, it seems ridiculous to me, but your figure tells me otherwise."

Nessie laughed. "There's a reason Americans are so crazy about it."

Fatima rolled her eyes. "We all know Americans are crazy, so you go run in circles. I'll be home later. Try not to stay out too long after dark—Papa gets nervous."

"I promise to be home before sunset," said Nessie, eying her feather duster. If Fatima would just leave and take her extreme dust sensitivity with her, Nessie could finish work early and get to the warehouse two full hours before the sun went down.

"See you later," said Fatima.

As soon as the bell over the door was silent Nessie grabbed the feather duster and cleaned the rest of the store at vampire speed.

oOo

The mechanics, as Nessie called her friends who readied hot cars for shipment, were starting to panic. Nessie had tried to keep her visits to their warehouse sporadic, if perhaps a bit too frequent, and they were disturbed enough about the unpredictable destruction of their merchandise to set up 24-hour armed surveillance. Last time there had been four of them, one for each of the warehouse's entrances. Today, no doubt in response to all four of Tuesday's guards blacking out and waking several hours later with substantial headaches and no memory of the afternoon, there were eight.

She didn't need to incapacitate any of them to get into the building; she always used the open window high on the east wall. They would hear the engines revving inside, however, and she didn't want to deal with all of them coming at her at once. She crept up behind them two at a time and knocked each one down with a quick smack to the temple. She was getting good at this.

When the last pair were lying on the pavement she scaled the wall in a blur and dropped down through her window. There were only four cars today, lined up at the far end of the warehouse as though huddled together for protection. She shoved her fist through the window of the first and then almost burst out laughing before she remembered where she was and bit her lip. Somebody had put a _club _on the steering wheel.

Well, it would be her pleasure to destroy their car and leave this ridiculous device attached and unharmed for them to find later that night. What morons.

She set to work and disabled all four cars in record time, stealing everything from the warehouse's small pile of ammunition that she could stuff down her bra and into her pants for good measure. She threw it all into a dumpster a few miles away and walked home with the sun at her back.

oOo

The bell rang cheerfully as Nessie bounded up the stairs with a grin on her face, ready to announce that she'd be able to join Abdul for dinner after all. She stopped short in the kitchen doorway when she saw Fatima sitting on a chair with her face in her hands, sobbing, and Abdul standing beside her and worrying at his beard.

"Come in, Dorianne," he said, "it's all right. I'm glad to see you back so early."

"What's wrong? Did something happen?"

Fatima lifted her head, but dropped it again as though she was too distraught to form words. Nessie raised her eyebrows at Abdul, who simply shook his head and looked down at his daughter. Were they trying to drive her insane?

"Those barricades that I told you about this morning," Fatima choked out at last, "they...they..." she swallowed and wiped her nose. "They were there because somebody set a decrepit old man on _fire _while he was getting off the bus this morning. Isn't that just a fabulous way to make a protest? Light an old man on fire! So courageous..." and she started crying again.

Nessie didn't move. She felt tears pricking at the corner of her own eyes.

"Apparently," said Abdul slowly, "a few Socialists have indicated they might be in favor of the remittance bill when it comes up tomorrow—enough to pass it—and it's set off some violence. Fatima heard all this at her meeting—I didn't know what happened this morning until she told me." He looked very old. Fatima continued sobbing quietly.

"I...let me make you some tea," said Nessie.

_Le seul bien qui me reste au monde est d'avoir quelquefois pleuré._

She wanted to do something, say something, but that ever-present fear of incompetence wouldn't let her. Her hands itched to reach out and touch Fatima, but she rubbed her palms on her skirt and turned on the stove.

"Tomorrow might be a difficult day, if things in the government go unfavorably," said Abdul. "I want you both to be prepared for that."

Neither woman responded. Nessie stared at the flame under the tea kettle, and Fatima's sniffling eventually trailed off into silence. When the water boiled Nessie poured it carefully over the leaves and set it down in front of them with a spoon and a jar of sugar. They drank with a rhythmic lifting and lowering of cups, and went to bed without another exchange of words.

oOo

Renesmee was extremely displeased to be awakened by Abdul at 6:30 the next morning. She had spent most of the night fruitlessly prowling the streets and gone to bed in a mood so foul that a couple hours of sleep had done nothing to wipe it away. Fatima was up and already rifling through her closet. She wouldn't be going to class today.

"I'm sorry to wake you both so early, but when I went downstairs a few minutes ago I saw some preparations for a barricade at the end of the street. I'm not sure that anything is going to happen, but I'd like you to get dressed as quickly as you can and then come have breakfast. I think we should stay together today."

Nessie complied wordlessly, though she contemplated mutiny. If the protestors were building barricades, they'd be at it for at least a few more hours. She saw no reason why she couldn't keep sleeping.

She and Fatima went downstairs together and began a very tense morning. Fatima's mouth was set in a thin, angry line, and she preserved a brooding silence Nessie didn't want to violate. They did all the usual things—made breakfast, tuned on the store's main lights, swept the aisles... but outside there were people gathering, their numbers increasing with every passing moment. When Nessie pressed her face against the window she could see the growing barricade looming over the street in a giant jumble of cars, furniture, and plywood. She was suddenly reminded of _Les Miserables _and its glorious Parisian street battles. The men who fought in them were courageous, and it had all seemed so grand, sad, and wonderful when she read it as a girl—the terrible but honorable price of fighting oppression.

Were all uprisings really just like this, though? A whole bunch of angry people who didn't know what to do about their problems except fight to the death over them? Or maybe she was being unfair. She wondered if there was some kind of glory in all this that she just couldn't see.

"Dorianne, it would be a good idea to come away from the window."

She wiped at the smudge her mouth had left on the glass and joined Abdul and Fatima by the stairs. The radio sat between them—its tinny voice had been speaking all morning about every subject in Europe except this one. Perhaps they wouldn't even announce the results of the vote at all. Then everyone in the street would just have to mill around until they got hungry and went home.

She sat down on an empty step and waited with her chin in her hand, watching the churning mass of people outside the window. Many of them were tapping at the phones in their hands, waiting for the news that seemed so slow in coming.

And then, just when Nessie was sure the woman on the radio would discuss the American stock market forever, they heard it.

"In domestic news, a controversial new bill that would set limits on the remittances foreign-born residents can send out of the country passed just moments ago."

They all looked at each other, inhaling sharply. The air seemed to disappear.

Outside, nothing changed right away. People continued to wander through the street, talking to each other and checking their phones. But the roar began just a few minutes later, and it caught and grew as the mass of men surged forward in the street. Abdul jumped up from the stairs.

"Lock the door and stay in the storage room," he said in a voice Nessie had never heard him use. He was taking all the cash out of the register. "Don't go upstairs. If anyone does comes in, you'll get trapped there. Stay down here and run out the storage door if anything happens."

Nessie was torn—they would all be safer upstairs, because she _could_ get them away. But could she reveal that? The necessity for secrecy was so deeply ingrained in her that in the midst of their danger she still wasn't sure it was justified. They would all hide at the back of the store, and if anything happened she would take out whoever came near them. If she revealed herself in the process, _that_ would be justifiable without a doubt.

Abdul was now standing with a wad of cash in each hand, looking for a safe place to hide it.

"Here," Nessie said, grabbing it from him and stuffing it down her shirt.

He looked unconvinced that Nessie's bra was the safest place to hide the money, but before he could open his mouth to object there was an almighty crash as the entire front window shattered to pieces. Glass rained down everywhere and Nessie ducked instinctively. Abdul was yelling.

"Get back, get back!"

"Where's Fatima?" With the sudden exponential increase in noise all around them, Nessie wasn't sure he could hear her.

"I'll find her! Just get back!" Abdul was tugging on her arm, looking wildly around for his daughter. A rock flew in through the open window and narrowly missed his head.

"Fatima! She was right... oh my god."

Nessie blinked rapidly, mistrusting her own sight. Fatima was on the sidewalk, right in the middle of the surging, yelling mass of people. She was perched on top of a broken vegetable crate, and she was screaming at the top of her lungs.

"...OWN WORST ENEMIES, AND YOU'RE TAKING US WITH YOU! YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO SUFFER, YOU SICK, STUPID..."

"Oh, no. Oh no, no, no. They're going to kill her," Abdul moaned. He stepped forward, clearly on a suicide mission, but Nessie threw her arm out across his chest.

"No, they aren't. Just give me a minute..." she scanned the street—it was absolute chaos. A cloud of tear gas obscured the entire next block. Fortunately, in all the madness no one seemed to have noticed the young woman trying to tell them all off, but when they did...

"YOU'RE HYPOCRITES! YOU SAY YOU WANT YOUR RIGHTS, BUT YOU WANT THEM THIS WAY? YOU'LL GET NOTHING! WE'LL ALL GET NOTHING! YOU THINK YOU'RE HEROS BUT YOU'RE GOING TO DIE LIKE CRIMINALS!"

"I am not going to stand here and watch this happen to my own child, Dorianne!" Abdul moved to shove her arm away, and seemed surprised when he couldn't.

"You have to trust me," she hissed desperately."I can take care of her. Just stay where you..."

There was the sound of a smashing bottle and they both staggered and fell backward as a huge blast of flaming heat exploded on the sidewalk not far from where Fatima was standing. Nessie shook her head to dispel the sudden dizziness and got to her feet to see flames dancing on the blackened pavement. Someone had thrown a molotov.

Fatima's singed vegetable crate was sitting by itself on the sidewalk, and panic began to rise in Nessie's throat as she squinted through the smoke, trying to find her. It didn't take long—a group of jeering men was cutting a wide path through the crowd, one of them dragging Fatima's seemingly unconscious form with him.

Oh, hell no.

She would have to do this very fast. She couldn't afford to be seen, but she had to get Fatima out, and she had to do it now. There was enough noise and craziness all around them that she might be able to pull it off without anyone noticing.

She knew she could jump from the street to the roof across in one go, but could she do it while holding Fatima? She had to try. She crouched and bolted with her strongest burst of speed, straight into the middle of the crowd. She shoved over anyone in her way, too desperate to try to be gentle. She ducked into the jeering group and dropped to crawl through them, scooting forward between their feet. When she was close enough she wrapped her hands around Fatima's ankles and tugged. The man dragging her lost his hold and stumbled backwards, arms flailing through the air. Before he could look down and figure out what had happened she pulled Fatima further out of the way and gathered her up.

"Please," she whispered, without knowing who she was talking to. She jumped, and as the walls on the other side of the street came hurtling closer she realized that she was going to make it. They were going to clear the roof and everything was going to be fine.

Fatima, unfortunately, opened her eyes in midair.

She went rigid in Nessie's arms but they were on the roof so fast she didn't have time to scream.

Nessie looked down at her. "It's probably better if you keep your eyes closed."

She leapt from roof to roof in no particular direction, just desperate to get far enough away from the riot to put Fatima back on the ground. After what she judged to be about three miles she paused and listened for any sound of disturbance. Hearing nothing, she dropped down into an alley and set Fatima on her feet.

Fatima's hands were clenched into fists, her eyes screwed tightly shut.

"You can, um, open them now."

Fatima took a deep breath and complied. She blinked a few times and pressed a hand to the back of her head, wincing.

"How did you get knocked out?" Nessie demanded. "Do you know what happened?"

"It happened when that bottle exploded, I think. It startled me and I fell off my box and hit my head."

Nessie crept to the edge of the alley, looking up and down the street. She could hear shots in the distance—maybe she hadn't gotten as far away as she thought...

"It _was_ you, this whole time." Fatima said.

Nessie whirled around. "You knew?"

Fatima almost managed a smile. "I told you I'd been having trouble sleeping."

"Look, we can't talk about this right now. I couldn't explain it if I wanted to, all right? You would know better than I would—is anyone going to remember what you did today? Everyone you saw—were they strangers?"

Fatima closed her eyes. "No."

"What?"

"I...before the bottle blew up, I saw several boys I went to school with. They recognized me, too. I know they did."

Nessie started pacing. "You aren't safe, are you?"

Fatima sighed. "No, probably not. I know they'll remember.."

"Even if I try to follow you everywhere... they'll want to take it out on your father too, won't they?"

"Yes," Fatima whispered, tears in her eyes.

"We have to get you out of here."

"Dori, there's nowhere for me to go!" she yelled. She grimaced and reached for the back of her head again. "Ow. I have a lump."

"We can get you on a train down to Toulouse. Your father can't come right away, not if you both want to be able to come back someday. It has to look..."

"Dori, what are you talking about? I can't go to Toulouse!"

"Yes, yes you can. My family has a house there. You can stay as long as it takes for all of this to die down."

"Your family...?"

"I just need to write..." She started feeling around in her pockets for something to write on. She had a pen, but no paper. "Damn it!" she burst out. Her fingers were shaking.

"Here, here!" said Fatima, handing her a tissue. Nessie spread it out against the brick wall, trying not to tear it. Her hands were still trembling, but she managed to scrawl out a fairly legible note.

_This is Fatima. Don't ask her any questions. Just let her stay. Please. I sent her. -Renesmee_

She wrote out the address on the back and handed Fatima the tissue. "I'm almost certain you won't find anyone at the house. Just...break a window to get in. No one will care." Fatima frowned and lifted the note up to the light.

"Ren...es...mee? What does that mean?"

"That's my real name."

Fatima's frown deepened. "What ethnicity _are_ you? I've never heard anything..."

"Here!" Nessie interrupted, pulling Abdul's cash out of her bra and shoving it into Fatima's unoccupied hand. "This should be enough to get you a ticket and buy you food until Abdul and I can come down. We'll wait a few weeks and close up the shop. Can you find the metro from here and get to the station?"

Fatima was still looking at the tissue in her hand. She seemed a bit dazed. "Uh, yeah, I think so. I can find a bus on this block."  
"No!" said Nessie sharply. "Not the bus. The metro."

Fatima nodded. "Right, okay. The metro."

They looked at each other for a few moments. Nessie's heart was still pounding double time, even though their immediate danger had been averted. Fatima seemed totally overwhelmed, and Nessie felt, once again, that urge to reach out and touch. This time she gave into it, throwing her arms around Fatima and squeezing her as tightly as she dared.

_Be safe. We're coming after you. Everything will be fine._

Fatima gasped and pulled back, her hands on Nessie's shoulders. "Did you just...how did you..." She shook her head and smiled. "Okay, Ren...iz...Run...es... I have no idea who you really are, and I can't pronounce your name," she said, "but I know you're a very brave woman."

"People just call me Nessie, and trust me," she said, "you're braver than I am."

Fatima pulled her close one more time, and then ran out of the alley and down the street. Nessie followed until Fatima found a metro entrance and disappeared down the stairs.

oOo

The cash register was busted open, but nothing else was terribly out of place. Nessie's feet crunched over hundreds of tiny shards of glass as she walked through the empty store. It didn't look like a single book was out of place. Those taking advantage of the riots had more immediate things on the brain, apparently. It was a good thing they'd managed to hide all the money. She couldn't have gotten Fatima away without it.

"Abdul?" she called. There was no answer. She tried not to imagine what might have happened. Instead, she picked up the broom and started sweeping all the glass into small, sparkling piles. How much was a new window going to cost?

When the bell rang an hour later Nessie looked up to see Abdul standing in the doorway. Except for a cut along his temple he appeared to be unharmed, but he looked absolutely dejected. His shoulders were bent toward the floor. "I couldn't find her," he said.

Nessie set down the broom and crunched her way over to him. "I found her," she said. "She's fine."

He looked up at her sharply. "What?" he demanded. "Where is she? Why isn't she here?"

"You know I couldn't bring her back here. People recognized her today."

"Then where is she?" His voice was rising dangerously.

"I gave her all the money from the register and sent her to my family's house in Toulouse. She's perfectly safe."

Abdul let out a shaky breath and dropped his head. Nessie picked up the broom again, wanting to allow him a moment.

"We'll leave tonight, then," he said. "I have a little more cash upstairs. I'm not sure what we'll do after that..."

"No," said Nessie. "We can't."

"You want me to just leave her to fend for herself? We don't have a choice!"

"No, no, that's not what I want, but we have to wait, Abdul. This is your life, yes? You want to be able to come back here?" She swept her arm around at the shelves of books.

"She's far more important!"

"I know, but if we can just wait long enough for people to see you by yourself, to think that Fatima got what was coming to her and you're alone now..."

"You think they'll come after me and the shop if they think she got away."

"Yes."

"And if we spend more time here, and I look like I've lost my daughter, they might be satisfied?"

"Yes, that's what I think."

"I don't like this."

"If you close the store up in three weeks because your heart is broken and you can't stand being here anymore, you can leave with no questions asked and then maybe in six months, when this whole thing is over, you can come back, and Fatima can go back to school and you can open up the shop again..." He wasn't looking convinced. "Abdul, this is the only way I see to keep you both safe and stop your home from being burned to the ground! I told you that you had to trust me. I kept her safe, didn't I? Trust me again, please. Just one last time. You know she's a smart girl. She has plenty of money and she'll be fine."

Abdul sighed. "Fine. Three weeks. No longer. Then I'm following her no matter what you say."

Nessie nodded.

"I'm going upstairs to rest. I'll talk with you tomorrow." And he was gone.

Nessie cleaned up the rest of the glass and heaved several shelves of books in front of the broken window. By the time she was finished, it had grown dark. For the first time in months, she climbed the stairs to the attic and stayed inside all night long. She didn't have the heart to go prowling, for once, but she didn't sleep. Neither did Abdul—Nessie knew because the light below his door fanned out into the hallway until dawn.


	9. Chapter 8

Alice Cullen was reaching for a purple Hermès scarf when her entire weekend disappeared.

None of the humans standing near her noticed the slight widening of her eyes or the way her tiny white hand faltered in midair. To their weak senses the enigmatic woman's movements were fluid as she plucked out a plum-colored piece of silk and twirled in the direction of the register. Even those who knew her well might not have noticed; her features were entirely obscured by a broad-brimmed black hat and the bottom of her jaw was barely visible beneath its long shadow.

The other shoppers glanced sideways at her as she stood in line swathed head to toe in expensive black. It was a strange outfit for summertime in Paris, but none of them felt inclined to point this out to one another; they had a strange feeling she would hear them.

She conducted her purchase in silence. The clerk, usually completely unfazed by intimidating people, was so overcome by nervousness and discomfort that she dropped the woman's black card twice before managing to swipe it. She passed it back with trembling fingers and found the courage to look up, but her "_Merci Madame…_" faltered on her lips. The woman was already gone.

oOo

"Dorianne! I'm leaving for lunch!"

Nessie groaned and let her head fall back against the wall behind her. With one very French gust of air she rose to her feet, toed aside the box of books she'd been packing, and made her way to the front of the store, where Abdul stood with his hand on the doorknob. He gave her an apologetic smile.

"I know you hate working the front at noon, but now that Fatima…" He trailed off, looking a bit lost.

"I know." She said quickly. "It's fine. I don't mind."

Nessie couldn't cook, and she and Abdul were both suffering in Fatima's absence.

Abdul swallowed. "Thank you," he said quietly, and ducked out the open door.

The call to prayer echoed, warbling, from minaret to minaret as Nessie took her place at the register. She glanced out the window and saw that the sun had come out while she had been in the back room; her arms were glowing slightly. She held up one pale, shining hand for closer inspection, turning it under the sunlight. She always worried that someone would notice she looked a bit radioactive on nice days. No one had ever mentioned it, though, and she supposed she had current trends in fashion to thank for that. Maybe she just looked like she'd had a long bath in some expensive, luminous anti-aging product.

_This is ridiculous, _she thought, dropping her hand and peering again through the newly-repaired window that Abdul's insurance had purchased. _There isn't even anyone on the street._ The days following the riot had been much like the days preceding it—absolutely silent. The tense atmosphere, however, had been replaced by a brooding, impotent despair Nessie could almost taste every time she left the house.

It wouldn't make the slightest difference if she weren't standing right here, she reasoned—she could hear the bell anywhere in the tiny store, and she always felt strangely over-exposed when she stood at the front. She scooted out from behind the counter and wandered through the shelves, looking for something else to do.

No one had organized the novels in weeks. Since Fatima's abrupt "disappearance" both Abdul and Nessie had let too many things slide by. _Nigeria _was completely out of order—someone had thumbed through about twenty titles and left the books scattered all over the dusty shelves. Nessie suspected the bearded American who had tried to flirt with her.

Cursing him and all other coarse, self-satisfied men, she picked the books up and piled them neatly, so she could organize them by author. She paused when she saw the blue cover of _Purple Hibiscus _at the top of the stack, and felt an ominous creeping of memory. Carlisle had given her a copy of it once.

He had personally overseen most of her education, given her almost every book she ever read. Her parents had more of a natural right, perhaps, but they gracefully stepped aside because he was Carlisle. He knew everything. It was also obvious that he was incredibly enthusiastic about the shaping of a young mind—Nessie was his first chance. All of his other children had come to him with minds of stone, already honed to a semi-permanent shape by the north side of Chicago or Appalachia or Forks High.

Nessie was truly a child, however highly gifted or growth-accelerated, and they all wanted to make their own impression upon the one malleable member of their family. She'd been able to sense their fascination like a palpable force; everything she did or learned or said was unprecedented, intriguing, cause for either a celebration or an article in _Supernatural Medicine Today. _

She traced a finger over the woman's face on the cover of the book, remembering.

"_This is IB standard in the UK, but heaven knows it might still not challenge you. I've never seen someone so small and so intelligent." _

_She took the book from him with an eager grin and read the back cover. _"_Is it good?"_

"_Absolutely. But that's not the only reason I've…"_

_Carlisle was ineloquent so rarely that Nessie lifted her eyes in surprise at his silence. He was looking at her very seriously._

_"It's important for you to know how much evil can be done in the name of God, Nessie."_

_She opened her mouth and closed it again, knowing she was missing something. _

_"You're such a unique mix of adult and child that I sometimes wonder how to tell you things like this." When she still didn't speak, he smiled and kissed her on the forehead. "Read it, and do tell me what you think."_

She slammed _Purple Hibiscus _back into its place on the shelf and tried with all her might to push back the vortex of memory. She couldn't afford things like this. Every moment she spent thinking about him or her parents or Jacob or anyone else in her family made her life more difficult, like she was wading through viscous liquid with every step she took.

_English language fiction, done. Arabic language fiction, done. _She worked manically, attempting to occupy every corner of her high-capacity mind with the task at hand. She was reaching for a set of Chinua Achebe's critical essays, determined to sort the nonfiction section as well, when the doorbell tinkled.

It happened in a split second. She straightened at the sound of the bell, and then stiffened as a terrifyingly familiar scent of honeysuckle wafted towards her.

_No._

_Oh, God._

Her eyes snapped up to see exactly what she feared—her favorite aunt framed in the doorway like a beautiful nightmare, yellow eyes burning under a giant black hat. Nessie crouched slightly, prepared to spring sideways and escape through the back, but before her feet could leave the ground she felt a powerful hand grip her lower jaw.

"Don't even think about it, little miss half-vamp. You know I'm faster."

She slumped against the bookshelf, defeated and sick to her stomach. She had almost forgotten what it was like to be so weak.

"Hi Alice." She said tonelessly.

oOo

_So, how have you been?_

_What brings you to Paris this summer?_

_Has anyone forgiven me? Has anyone even been looking for me?_

_Did you have to move after I killed that guy?_

There was no way to begin this conversation.

Nessie stirred her coffee, eyes fixed firmly on the tablecloth. Alice wasn't saying anything either; apparently she wanted this to be as painful as possible. Minutes went by.

Nessie couldn't have spoken even if she'd known what to say—Alice's very presence was overwhelming her. What had she done wrong? How had they found her? She had been so certain... It felt like her brain had short-circuited under the combined force of the total catastrophe of the situation and the plain fact that she yearned with all her being to hold onto Alice and never let go.

So she pretended to be very interested in her demitasse.

"So, Monster," Alice said abruptly. Nessie looked up in surprise to find her aunt gazing at her with mild interest. "I'm assuming from that ridiculous name you gave yourself that you swam here?"

Nessie snorted nervously. "Um… not really. I stowed away on an oil freighter."

Alice shook her head. "Dorianne Teintée? Really? You must get your dramatic flair from Edward."

Nessie bristled. "As difficult as it may be to understand, I was a lot younger eight months ago. I know it was stupid, all right?"

"Calm down, Nessie, for heaven's sake. Apparently you left your sense of humor somewhere between France and Seattle."

Nessie pinched the bridge of her nose. "I'm sorry, Alice. I'm just…unprepared for this."

"I'm sure you are. I've only had a few more hours to think about this than you have, though, and I'm not biting your head off."

Nessie's brow furrowed. "You weren't looking for me?"

"No, I was buying my fall wardrobe. Having the time of my life, actually, until I had to start tracking this annoying little blind spot."

Nessie was so grateful for Alice's casual tone that she almost kissed her. Suddenly, talking to her aunt seemed a lot more possible.

"Look, Alice, I'm sorry. I know what I did. I know how much I hurt everyone, but…"

"Nessie," Alice interrupted sharply, "be quiet."

Nessie compressed her lips and obeyed.

Alice took a deep breath and fixed her with a determined stare. "Ness, I know what it's like to be the girl telling people things they don't want to hear. If I could do one thing for you, I would make you understand that you _didn't do anything wrong._"

"Alice, what the hell are you talking about? I _killed_ someone, remember?"

"Language, Nessie. Look…this is important, and I need you to understand. That day, when…"

Nessie gripped the arm of her chair so tightly she felt it snap. She pried her fingers loose one by one and concentrated on not jumping from her seat and finding a new city to start over in. She grabbed her coffee cup and downed it, realizing too late that she hadn't added any sugar.

"That day, when you stood there in the dining room and told us all exactly what we'd done to you… Ness, you were _right. _You were right and we needed to hear it. I won't speak for everyone else, but I know that we owe you an apology, and I'm giving you mine."

Nessie studied the tablecloth, hoping Alice wouldn't notice her rapid blinking and trembling lips. It sucked, being the only one who could cry. She could never accept Alice's removal of blame, but some part of her had always known that her family still loved her. She may have run away on impulse, but she had stayed away because of this—because she couldn't face their love anymore. And now Alice was making her.

"Nessie, look at me."

Damn.

She lifted her eyes and met her aunt's gaze, as perfect and achingly familiar as she'd always imagined, and let the tears spill over and slide down her face.

"Nessie, I am so sorry that we didn't know how to take care of you. We just all love you so much..."

Nessie covered her mouth with her hand and began sobbing in earnest, shoulders shaking with every gasp. God, she had missed them, all of them. Alice just watched her with a sad smile, waiting patiently. For the second time in fifteen minutes, Nessie found herself grateful for Alice's tact.

The flood subsided quickly (they were in public, after all), and Nessie wiped her nose with her fist. She had so many questions to ask, but she was afraid of the answers and she didn't even know where to begin. "Did you move?" That seemed as good a place to start as any.

"Yes, we did, to Scotland." Alice wrinkled her nose, as though she found the very idea of the highland nation personally offensive.

"Why?"

"Well, we needed to go somewhere. You know we'd been in Forks about five years too long already. It seemed like the best…base of operations."

"Base of operations for what?"

"A full-scale search for a certain wayward half-vampire with curly hair."

Nessie's cheeks went up in flames. She'd wondered many times just how much trouble she had caused, and she really should have known that the Cullens would comb the universe to get back one of their own. _The golden child, no less, _she thought bitterly.

"We looked here." Alice muttered to herself. "I know we did. How was I supposed to know you would end up in _La Zone_? I know I raised you with better taste than that."

"Alice, I'm sure you'd prefer me to rent a five bedroom flat somewhere down here, but I happen to be a little smarter than that. You and Rosalie come to Paris all the time."

Alice entered full pout mode. "Isn't a decent wardrobe worth the risk? Look at you! A few miles west and you'd be in couture paradise. Ithought I'd given you some decent fashion sense. You look like your mother did before I got my hands on her."

Nessie looked down at her blue blouse and long white skirt. It wasn't _that _bad. The sandals, however... She sighed. "I've got other priorities, Alice."

"I bet you do. I don't suppose this _Ange des Ombres _people are talking about out there has any connection to you, or anything…"

Nessie tried to look stern. "Alice, that's none of your business. I'm doing what I have to do."

Alice smiled slightly and didn't reply.

Silence descended again. Nessie desperately wanted to know more, and her hand twitched on the tablecloth just inches from Alice's tiny fingers. Dangerous, inchoate questions swirled in her mind, but she laid her palm flat. She had long ago taught herself that if she couldn't find the courage to say something out loud, she didn't have the right to say it at all.

"Nessie…" Alice's voice broke in on her thoughts.

"What?" she asked warily.

"I don't have to be psychic to know what you're thinking. Go ahead and ask."

Nessie's finger twitched again. She eyed the short distance, and her hand shot out to Alice's before she could stop it. She pulled it away again, but not before the words had passed.

_How is he?_

Alice sighed. "It's kind of complicated. We were afraid it was going to be bad, like when Edward left Bella. Good for nothing, comatose, self-inflicted near-starvation and all that. But, Nessie, he's okay."

Nessie let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.

"Don't get me wrong, he's not _fine. _He's miserable, of course, and kind of aimless. But…well, it seems like both of you are stronger than your parents were, or more grounded…or something." She looked down at the table with knitted brows. "I'm not saying this right. What I mean is, he's not _empty_, and neither are you. That's the main thing. I look at you and I see a lot of hurt, and fear, and uncertainty, but it's _you. _It's the same way with him. He came with us to Scotland, you know. I think he kind of hates it, but he's not there much. He goes back to La Push all the time. And whenever one of us goes looking for you somewhere we haven't looked before, he comes. You should have seen him in Thailand…he almost got thrown in jail twice."

Alice smiled at the memory. If Nessie hadn't been fighting tears again she would have asked to hear the story, but there was a weight on her chest so heavy she couldn't open her mouth. Why did she have to want so many things she couldn't have?

As if reading her thoughts again, Alice said, "I'm clarifying my earlier statement, by the way. You weren't wrong about us, but you _were _wrong about him."

It felt like Alice had stabbed her. "I know." she whispered.

For the first time that day, her aunt looked angry. "Don't just sit around here thinking you can't fix this, Nessie. All you have to do is come home."

"It isn't that simple."

"It _is _that simple. You just don't want it to be."

Nessie scowled. Apparently Alice didn't understand as much as she thought she did. "Look, there are things I can't just…"

"Edward is thinking about going to the Volturi."

There was a brief pause, and then several people in the street turned their heads at the sound of smashing china.

"What did you say?" Nessie hissed.

Alice looked impressed as she quickly disposed of the shards of Nessie's coffee cup. "You're stronger than you used to be. I didn't know you could do that with one hand."

"Alice, don't change the subject."

"I'm not trying to. And no, before you ask, he hasn't actually said anything. But I see it sometimes. It's hazy, but it's clear enough that I know he's been entertaining the thought."

"But _why_? Why would he do something so stupid?"

Alice shrugged. "This is Edward we're talking about. He does stupid things all the time when he's feeling dramatic. We could have stayed off their map for years if he hadn't traipsed over there in a snit to get himself killed." Nessie apparently looked like she was about to start smashing more of the tableware, because Alice got to the point very quickly. "From what I can gather he thinks they could track you and get you to come home. I know it doesn't make sense, okay? I know even better than you do because I can see exactly how it would turn out. And no, I'm not going to tell you. You don't want to know."

There were few things Nessie feared more than the Volturi. They hung like a shadow over her childhood, the remorseless menace that had almost succeeded in killing her entire family. Her father was the only one who knew she'd never stopped dreaming about them and he should know better than anyone that she would rather die than face them again, even if they did just benevolently drag her home by the hair. But he had to know they would never leave it at that. Involving them in _anything_ could only lead to disaster. What was he thinking?

"Nessie, you don't understand how desperate he is. There's a lot I haven't told you, mostly because I don't want to hurt you any more than you've been hurt already…" Alice paused, but something about the look on her niece's face made her decide to continue.

"He loves you more than ever, and he's beyond desperate to get you back. The longer they search without finding you, the less rational he gets. Look, I wasn't lying when I said I didn't come to Paris looking for you. I know I can't force you to do anything, and I know it would be stupid to try. Just think about it, all right? We're worse off without you than you think."

She rose from the table and dropped a few euros next to her intact, undrunk cup.

"I know why you're here, in Paris," she whispered, her lips next to Nessie's ear. "I know it's because of what I said that time, by the river. But think, Nessie. What if that moment I felt... what if it hasn't come yet?"

Nessie bit the inside of her cheek.

"You don't have any more excuses," said Alice, pressing a small piece of paper into Nessie's hand before she turned and left without another word.

Nessie stared after her giant black hat until it whipped out of sight behind the _boucherie_. She looked down at the paper in her hand, and saw several phone numbers and an address in Inverness.

She had no idea what to do.

* * *

**A/N**: _boucherie_ - Butcher. PM me if there's something else I didn't translate. For those of you with _déjà vu_ : this is, for the most part, the original one-shot I wrote for the Canon Fodder Challenge. :)

For the next few months, I'll be preparing for (and then in) grad school again. It's a very compressed, demanding term, and I'm not sure how frequently I'll be able to focus on this story and get you guys updates. Just wanted to give you all a heads up.

Thanks for reading!


	10. Chapter 9

**A quick recap**: Nessie has sent Fatima to the Cullens' house in Toulouse to keep her safe after the Remittance Riots, and she has convinced Abdul to stay and play the grieving father until things die down. Alice has appeared briefly, and given Nessie the family's address in Scotland.

* * *

Nessie didn't know how long she wandered after leaving the cafe, but she realized when she hit the edge of her own neighborhood that she had indeed walked all the way home from the 4th. It was getting dark, and she was no closer to knowing what to do with the slip of paper balled up in her right fist. Her hand itched to throw it in a gutter, but she couldn't quite bring herself to toss this overture from her family to the wind as though it meant nothing. She owed them more than that.

She thought about going home, about every face she would see and what they might say when they saw her again for the first time.

She thought of her mother's happiness, the warmth in her gold eyes.

She thought of tearing her way out of her mother's body.

She fingered the tiny locket she always wore beneath her shirt, sliding it open and closed again with one finger. _Plus que ma propre vie._ That was the problem, wasn't it?

She thought of Irina, smoking in bits on the ground, Tanya and Kate holding each other and sobbing a vampire's silent tears.

She thought of how every member of her family had narrowly escaped the same fate.

She thought of how they all still lived with that constant taste of tension, knowing who would come swooping in for vengeance if any of them put a foot wrong. All that was needed was a new excuse.

She thought of how she had put a foot wrong, almost given an excuse.

She thought of the man whose throat she had torn open.

She thought of Saint Denis, of Fatima and Abdul, of the people she'd saved and the people she hadn't, of the weapons that weren't coming in anymore.

She wanted to go home and they wanted her back, but she couldn't go to Scotland unless she could stand straight, look them in the eye, know beyond a doubt that she deserved a place there. She wouldn't be able to bear their forgiveness otherwise. She would just leave again, ashamed and unworthy as ever.

Her brow furrowed as she realized that she had no idea where she stood on the moral scale of the universe. She had to finish this work first, but she didn't know when it would be done, how many acts of justice it would take. She had never asked the question before, never needed to. She glanced up at the twilit skyline before her and saw the imposing, Gothic spires of Saint Denis Cathedral. They were a familiar sight, hovering over the entrance to the metro. She passed them almost every day, but she'd never gone inside. On impulse she crossed the street, climbed the steps, and pressed open the ancient doors.

The candlelit hush was immediate. Renesmee stared at the ceiling, stretching to vaulted points seeming miles above her. She remembered Carlisle explaining on a visit to Salisbury, when she was very little, what cathedrals were like before electricity—how easy it was to believe that they towered into eternity. Jacob had been standing beside her, and he picked her up, tossed her into the air, and said, "Go tell us what it's like!" He caught her when she came back down, of course, and she buried her face in his shoulder, giggling. "Well?" he asked.

"Very pretty," she'd said.

Cathedrals, yes. Eternity, no. At least, she didn't think so anymore.

There was no one in here. Nessie wandered to a flickering bank of candles, thinking about lighting one and kneeling down to ask for something. She moved to the font and stared down at her reflection, watching it waver and distort as replenishing water bubbled up from the pipe at the bottom of the basin. She moved on to a pew, sat down, looked around some more. There was a green light over the confessional booth, harsh and strange against the numinous backdrop of stained glass and stone. She stood again, hesitated, scooted out and opened the confessional door, sat down inside. The space was small, the screen to her right almost opaque. She leaned forward minutely, staring out of the corner of her eye through the hundreds of tiny crosses in the iron grill. She was unsure about the etiquette of these sorts of exchanges, but she knew that the point of the whole thing was to ___not _look at each other. The silence expanded.

"I've, um, this is the first time...I've never...I'm not Catholic or anything."

"That's all right, my child." The voice from the other side was thin and reedy, trembling with age. She leaned forward a bit further.

"Do I just, um, start talking?" She could see his hands in his lap, tattooed with cross-shaped shadows. They were knobby, covered in blue veins and stiff with arthritis. This priest was ancient.

"Yes, my child."

"Okay, so... I committed a murder."

There was silence from the other side. She waited, saw him clench and extend his slightly shaking fingers. He was going to have a heart attack. Her confession was going to send this nonagenarian into cardiac arrest.

Wonderful.

She sighed, moved to leave.

"And was this occurrence...recent?"

"No, no! No," she said, sitting back down. "It was a good while ago. And really far away. There's nothing to tell the police about or anything..."

"What were the circumstances of your crime?"

_ Well, I'm half-vampire and I started really wanting blood, so I bit a guy's neck and drank away his life force over a span of thirty seconds. _"Temporary insanity. I cut a stranger's throat." She winced. He wheezed.

"Has this ever happened again?"

_ Almost. _"No."

"And have you repented of this terrible sin?" His voice wavered over the last words.

"Well, yeah, I think so. I mean, of course I have. I feel terrible about it."

"Have you received absolution?"

"Well, no. That's kind of why..." she sighed. "I've been making up for it, but I don't know how much I need to do. Like, how much does it take? I just want to know when I'm going to be finished, because I have some... plans to make. I mean, I know that sounds trivial, but I promise it isn't. I've been keeping people safe, while everything has been so bad around here. And that's good, right? I'll stay until I've done it all, but I need to leave _sometime_, and..." She trailed off, fearing she'd been talking too much.

She heard the priest shift in his chair. "The Lord...ah...tells us that grace is given freely..." He was stumbling over his words. Poor man. The people who came and sat in this box probably confessed lustful thoughts or envy of their friends' shoes. She was his first murderer, old as he was. He cleared his throat and continued. "It isn't something won by goodness, because you would never succeed..."

_ Never_ succeed? She realized when he said it that this was exactly what she had feared and suspected, that she would step forward and slide backward for the rest of her immortal existence, never gaining anything. The tiny box was suddenly making her feel claustrophobic. She wanted to cry. This had been a terrible idea.

"Even the gravest of sins, such as, ah, murder... are covered if one is truly...repentant of them. And, you repent most heartily?"

"_Yes_," she said, frustrated.

"I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit," he mumbled rapidly, as if he wanted to get rid of her. "Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good."

That was it? She got up and left, more frustrated than ever. She left the heavy scent of incense and the unnatural hush behind her with the creaking of the door, gaining the street to see a few, weak stars gracing the cathedral's stone spires. She went home.

She didn't explain her nine hour absence to Abdul, who opened his mouth and raised a finger as she walked past the kitchen. She felt guilty for leaving the shop entirely unattended while he was at lunch, but for some reason her story-making skills weren't on call and she couldn't figure out what to tell him besides, "My aunt showed up and asked me to come home." So she didn't say anything. She'd apologize later.

In the attic, she paced from the wardrobe to the window and back again. The room had felt strange ever since Fatima left—her pallet was still on the floor, her clothes and photographs still scattered around the room. Her most essential clothes and books were now stuffed in a duffel bag by the door. Nessie had packed them that morning, so they'd be able to take them to her when they left.

Wardrobe, window. Wardrobe, window.

_Plus que ma propre vie. _So, so heavy.

Wardrobe, window.

_I know what it's like to be the girl telling people things they don't want to hear._

_ You didn't do anything wrong._

Wardrobe, window.

She paused at the edge of the bed, fingering her locket again. For the first time since she'd run away she pulled it out of her shirt and opened it, needing suddenly to see their faces. They smiled up at her, bronze and brown, eyes matching and frozen.

_Given freely..._

She would take Abdul to Toulouse, and then she was going to Scotland. Finished or no.

oOo

She just wanted to do _one_ more car. For fun. As a sendoff, or something. Her friends the mechanics deserved a parting gesture and she had half a bottle of silicate left, so that next evening after closing she went back to the warehouse. It was full dark, a few hours later than she usually showed up there, but she had been trying to make up for her failures as an employee yesterday and stayed late to pack up the whole back room into storage boxes. It had taken longer than she thought it would, because Abdul had wanted to help her. She'd been reduced to human speed.

There were no sentries out today, so she hopped onto the wall and crawled carefully up it to the broken window. She was only a few inches below the ledge when she heard voices coming from the ground floor inside. She froze, listening.

"We're trying to take care of it." Gold Incisor, if she wasn't mistaken. Damn it, how many of them were in there? She wasn't going to get a chance today; she'd come too late.

"I'm unconvinced."

A tingling chill ran to Nessie's fingers at the sound of the second voice. It was hauntingly, powerfully musical. Seductive, compared to the harsh words of the other speaker. It was the voice of a vampire.

"You've proved your incompetence repeatedly. I am displeased and I'm prepared to deal with this situation myself."

"If you suck me dry and leave me somewhere," said Gold Incisor, his voice rising to panic pitch, "you won't get anyone else to work for you. Everyone will know pulling cars for you means dying, man. They're freaked about you already."

Nessie peeked as boldly as she dared over the ledge of the window, trying to get a glimpse of the vampire on the warehouse floor. She had to know what was going on, who was involved in this. She craned her neck slightly as a night breeze ruffled her hair, and she saw him. He was huge, towering over the man she had until now thought tall. His hand was in the air, forestalling his companion's speech. His shoulders lifted as he inhaled deeply and she shoved away from the wall in terror. Her heart hammered as she dove into a free fall, landing painfully on her right shoulder and rolling onto her back. She was up again immediately, sprinting in no general direction with her pulse in her throat. She was done for. She'd know Felix anywhere.

There was no way he didn't hear her climbing the wall. No way he didn't smell her, know she was a vampire. No way he didn't hear her heart beating, her lungs expanding, know she was also _not_ a vampire. No matter how fast she ran he could catch her in seconds.

She ran blindly, pushing her legs until they burned and her lungs caught fire. She never changed course, fearing it would slow her down. Every second she expected a giant, cold hand to slip around the back of her neck and slam her down. After about an hour of this her body refused to go any further, and she stumbled to a stop in the middle of an open field, falling to all fours and gasping for breath. Around her, all was silent. There was a small town winking in the distance, a road empty of traffic winding like a ribbon back the way she'd come. She looked frantically left, right, up, down for a pair of glinting ruby eyes in the trees, but there was nothing. Where was he? He had to have followed her. He was just playing with her now.

She stood in the knee-high grass in painful indecision, waiting for her life to end, but it never happened. He hadn't followed her. She collapsed on the ground and tried to calm her body and organize her thoughts. The stars above her dotted the purple sky in a riot of light, so different from the few meager ones she'd seen outside the cathedral. So beautiful, but she had never appreciated them less.

Felix was in Paris. The boss, the boss she'd never seen...it was him. Was this Volturi business? Was he doing it on his own? She thought of a whole legion of the gray-cloaked Guard chanting "Yes, Master," in an eerie monotone—no, he was not doing this by himself, which meant that she had spent the past month tangling with the Volturi. The _Volturi_. She couldn't even bring herself to think about what that meant.

It was getting late, and it would take her a long time to run all the way home. Abdul would be worried about her if she stayed out past midnight, and she hadn't told him where she was going. She stood, shook out her legs, and ran back at a slower pace, careful to make a wide circle around the neighborhood and stay well away from the warehouse. She dropped down from a roof a block south of the bookstore and walked the rest of the way, setting off the bell as she tried to think of a suitable excuse for her absence from dinner. She trudged slowly up the stairs, all her muscles protesting. She had never been so sore in her life.

Abdul was standing in the hallway with his hands on his hips. She drew breath to give him an explanation but no words ever came out.

"Where have you been? I didn't even know you were leaving, and I was afraid you weren't going to... Dorianne? Dorianne, are you all right? What's wrong?"

"He's been here," she muttered.

"What?"

She pushed past Abdul and stormed the house, throwing open every door. There was nothing out of place, but the scent was unmistakable. Panic bubbled up in her throat. She turned to look at Abdul, who was trailing her through the house with a puzzled expression on his face. She couldn't believe he'd been left alive.

"It's time to go," she said.

"Dorianne, we're not leaving until next week. There's too much to take care of if we're boarding up this whole place... you told me all of this yourself."

"Well, I was wrong. You're leaving now. You're leaving tonight. I'll stay. I'll finish packing everything and close the place up and follow you."

"It's 22:00, Dorianne. This is ridiculous."

"You don't understand!" she burst out, grabbing his arm. "You need to leave now! Take the money, take a change of clothes, and go. I'm not joking, Abdul. You need to leave right now."

His eyes narrowed as he searched her face, alarmed. "What happened?" he asked.

"Just trust me. Please. I'm keeping you both safe."

She watched from the kitchen window as he made his way down the street, burdened only by the duffel bag bouncing against his hip.

* * *

**AN: **If you're still with this story after that ridiculously long hiatus, well, you are a better reader than I deserve. I have returned from school (hooray!) and am now free to focus all of my creative energy on this story until it is finished.

Just one note on this chapter:

_Plus que ma propre vie_: More than my own life. The locket Nessie wears is the one Bella gave her for their first Christmas together in Breaking Dawn.


	11. Chapter 10

By the next morning, Nessie had finished what would have taken Abdul another week. The windows were boarded and the furniture draped in dirty fabric, dust hovering invisible in the shadowed air. There wasn't a book in sight—every last volume was packed away in one of the cardboard boxes that towered almost to the ceiling in the storage room. She'd had trouble shutting the back door after she filled the last box, and she wondered what would happen when the Debhis came back and opened it again.

She rubbed at her eyes. She had cleaned and packed through the night after Abdul's departure, unwilling to close her eyes for even a few minutes with such a deadly threat still pressing into the walls around her. As the clock had passed midnight and ticked into the early hours of the morning, she paced the stairs and flitted from window to window, her every sense straining for the slightest indication that Felix had returned or, more disturbing yet, never really left at all.

She didn't understand why he had come and gone without killing someone. Surely he knew the meddler he wanted to remove lived in this house, was partly human but not fully human, with both venom and a heartbeat in her body. He had to want her. She realized for the first time that he could drink her, if he wanted. She would bleed if teeth that strong pierced her skin.

But he never came. His scent grew fainter through the hallways of the house and she never felt the sudden pressure of his huge, icy hands around her neck. Had she really gotten away with this? As the morning light began to filter through the chinks in the boards across the windows she had to believe that yes, as crazy as it seemed she _had_ really gotten away with it, at least for now. She went upstairs and shoved some spare t-shirts into her backpack.

Now, she stood at the top of the stairs with her backpack over one shoulder, strangely reluctant to leave. She surveyed the shrouded, dusty world below her. It had been her home, her job, her life for almost a year, but in a matter of days it was rendered lifeless—a failed, run-down business like any other, and Nessie was surprised by just how hard it was to leave it that way.

In all practical senses this bookstore had failed a long time ago—she doubted the Debhis had seen a euro's worth of profit since...well, since before there were euros. Even Abdul's personal mission had failed—no disreputable youth had walked into this place, turned his hooligan ways around, and decided to pursue a peaceful, productive life of the mind instead. Abdul hadn't managed to change anything.

And yet she was blinking back tears. She felt a surge of affection for the frail man who had watched his family's wealth dwindle and his wife die, who had left his home and raised his daughter in a foreign city, working for years to make a small island in the sea drowning so many people around him.

Her fingers tightened dangerously on the banister. This couldn't be the end for them. They would come back, without Nessie, and they would tug off these sheets and open this door and laugh when a pile of falling books leapt out to greet them like a pack of loyal dogs. She closed her eyes and watched it happen, frame by frame, so that she could find the will to turn off the light, lock the door, and leave.

Last night's apprehension came roaring back the moment Nessie gained the opposite sidewalk. It was sunny, and more people were strolling the streets than anytime she'd seen since the riots. Life almost seemed normal again, though Nessie had been here long enough to know better. A woman with beaded hair coiled elaborately around the crown of her head tugged at the hand of a crying little girl in a bright pink dress as the mingled scent of blood and frying onions seeped through the air from the corner, where a restaurant sat next to the _boucherie halal_. A jaundice-eyed man grinned up at her from the front stoop of the barber shop, and she turned her head without an answering glance. Strange, how quickly she had picked up the mannerisms and cautions of the human women around her. Especially strange, considering the much more real threat that lurked here somewhere, crouching out of reach of the sun. She stared down every shadowed alley, up into the broken windows of every building, wondering if there were red eyes following her progress down the crowded street.

She had to be careful, even though it seemed like Felix had decided she wasn't worth his time. Anything was still possible. Nessie wasn't her father; she couldn't take the measure of a vampire and know if he was the sort whose mind was clear all the way to the bottom or murky with sinister purposes—if her enemy would attack head-on or bat her around like a mouse, for the fun of it. She had no way of knowing what Felix would do. Her memories of him were sharp but uninformative—a hulking, boulder-like figure in a snowy field, standing ground and taking orders with the sort of discipline only the Volturi guard had ever possessed. Her memories told her nothing but that he did what he was told. She remembered that Emmett had wanted to kill him.

Felix might be trying to discover as much about her as he could, tracking her movements to find the most advantageous way to kill her, see if anyone else knew the secret and needed to be ended as well. What if he remembered her? She could only hope he hadn't. She looked very, very different now, at least, and he wasn't Demetri. He had no sixth sense for her signature. He might just think she was a tall, strange women who liked to mess with his cars. Their cars. The Volturi's cars.

She swallowed. Aro and his brothers seemed to her in that moment like inescapable master spiders, the strands of their web crossing every impossible corner of the globe. She could have screamed at herself for not considering that she would trip into it somewhere, somehow if she insisted on living anywhere in Europe.

This black market arms trade, she realized, must be one of their many ways of amassing wealth. She had never really considered before where it came from—all that money, infinitely greater than the staggering wealth of her own family. The Volturi had no Alice to predict the markets, after all. Members of the guard probably oversaw operations like this all the time, legal and illegal alike. If human life didn't matter to you, what did? She shuddered as she thought of all these living, breathing people around her as vehicles of liquid, as a walking, talking, sentient food source. What a horrible way to see the world.

_You're no different, and you know it, _said a voice in her own cadence.

_I will never kill again, _she shot back. _There is a world of difference._

She squared her shoulders and sauntered at an easily human pace to the metro, still unsure whether or not she was ready to tell _La Zone_ goodbye.

oOo

She decided to run to Toulouse, even though it would take days. She would go the long way around, too, in case Felix was following her. She wanted him to get bored. From the heart of Paris she caught a bus heading toward Nantes, and got off at a small station in a dusty little village somewhere between Nantes and Chartres—she hadn't paid attention. The midsummer heat was oppressive, and the sun reflected on the empty asphalt of the town's main street, setting a slight haze of light to burn around her body. Nessie hitched up her backpack and walked down the empty street and out of the small town whose name she didn't know, into a cover of trees lining some farmhouse property. She looked left, then right, and seeing no one, she ran.

The forest was cool and dark. Nessie's feet barely touched the earth as she sprinted, birds calling to each other from the branches spreading high above her head. Both her father and her grandfather believed the natural world more sacred than any human creation, and just now she believed them—the sturdy trunks of ancient trees rose like columns to an arching roof of leaves, and the sun shooting down through its branches was so bright it looked like splashes of yellow paint dotted along the damp ground. Panic melted away as she pressed herself to her fastest speed.

She hoped the forest would last for miles. She had a vague idea of where she was going—straight south, and then maybe all the way down to the mountains and around a bit, so she could come up to Toulouse from an unexpected angle. She had no idea how long it was going to take; she'd told Abdul a couple of days. She ran without breaking her stride until night fell, and then she stopped to take a drink from a pond and sit for a few minutes...and the next thing she knew it was dawn, and a riot of birdsong pounded at her ears. She gasped and jumped to her feet, spinning in a disoriented circle with one hand pressed to her forehead. She couldn't believe she'd let herself fall asleep; he could have killed her.

She burst out laughing. He could have killed her? What did she think she would do if she were awake? Run away? Fight him off? Awake, asleep, it made no difference. She might as well sleep all she wanted...

She shook her head and told herself she needed to get moving again. Her throat burned dully, so she fell into a crouch and breathed deeply, picking up an unfamiliar animal scent only a few yards from the pond where she'd fallen asleep. She crept along the forest floor until she spotted it—a brindle-backed wild pig, snuffling through the dead leaves on the ground like it was hunting for truffles.

No. No way. That was just disgusting. Nessie backed away and wandered through the labyrinth of trees until she picked up the more familiar scent of deer. She gave in to the chase—leaping, biting, drinking. When she pushed the corpse away and wiped at her mouth she felt her thirst replaced by a rising nausea. For what had to be the first time in her life she found herself wishing for human food. It felt wrong and strange to be drinking blood.

She didn't wait for her stomach to settle before she left again—she was nervous about the time she'd lost. The forest continued for a few more hours, but eventually it fell away before a rolling sea of vineyards, and Nessie realized suddenly where she was. She was skirting the edge of a region she'd visited once with her mother, just the two of them. She'd forgotten all about it until just now.

_The whole day was a surprise. It was Bella and Nessie's first trip to Paris, and Bella consulted Alice for a cloudy day and bought two train tickets that were probably a waste of money—Nessie just sat in Bella's lap the whole way there, her faced pressed to the train window and her hand against her mother's arm, communicating a wordless rapture._

_Bella bought passes for all the most famous palaces in the Loire, so on that gray, rainy day months out from tourist season they were almost the only people wandering hundreds of golden rooms and galleries. They waltzed in one of the ballrooms while Bella hummed a minuet (Nessie got to be the girl, of course). They did Blois, and Chambord, and as fun as it was Nessie was sleepy and grumpy by the time they got to Chenonceau. It was definitely the most beautiful, white arches spanning the length of a still lake beneath glittering windows. Inside, however, it looked a good deal like all the others. They wandered opulent hallways, past portrait after portrait of red-cheeked young women in gauzy dresses._

_The tour guide paused and drew their attention to the swooping, cleavage-exposing necklines of these dresses. She told them that most of the immortalized young women had died of pneumonia before they were 25. Nessie gazed up into their flat eyes and tugged gratefully at her turtleneck sweater._

_The guide eventually left them to wander on their own, and they found a sitting room off a side hallway that wasn't roped off. There was a dark wood writing desk beside the fireplace, with a little silk embroidered chair and a window overlooking the lake. A baroque clock ticked on the marble mantel._

_Nessie opened her mouth to ask her mother if any of the clocks in their house were quite that old, but Bella was lost in contemplation, one hand resting on the ornate frame of the window. She looked, Nessie thought, like she belonged here. Like a princess, like someone who should be painted and have stories told about her forever—and there was something about the expression on her face that Nessie didn't like. As such a small girl she could only identify it as a bad feeling in her stomach, and she tugged at her mother's hand until Bella shook off her thoughts and followed her sleepy daughter back to the car they'd hired._

Nessie was years older now, but how many? Even she didn't know how old she had really become. In the months before she'd run away she had wanted so badly to be a woman, and was utterly convinced she was only moments away from being equal to everyone around her, being equal to Jacob, especially... but she had been so very, very wrong and now she couldn't even say. Six years old. It was true, but it was meaningless.

Six-year-old, teenage girl, whatever she was—she saw things now. Her mother and her father had lived a fairy tale, and fairy tales end when the Prince and the Princess get married. Sometimes it's mentioned at the close that the Prince and Princess have castles full of children, but that's when they're King and Queen and no one's very interested anymore.

Maybe if Edward and Bella could have gotten older, stepped back, given _her_ a turn. But they stayed youthful and perfect and desperately, hugely in love, gazing at each other over the dinner table where only Nessie was eating...

She edged west to cut a wider path around her memories.

oOo

Her system developed almost effortlessly—run, find water, drink. Run some more. Hunt deer, feed, run, sleep. Slow down to college-student-backpacker pace when nearing a road. It was almost too easy, and her fear of Felix began to retreat into a niggling worry. In three days she crossed into the Midi-Pyrénées, but she continued high into the mountains just to be safe. She'd never come this far towards Spain before, and she almost didn't want to stop just because it was so beautiful. She climbed higher and higher, past the treeline and into a world of rock and lichen in which no one could hide from her. She threw out her arms and breathed deeply of the thin, crisp air. In a few shadowed nooks and crevices there was still a little bit of snow hiding from the late summer sunshine. She scooped a small handful and touched it to her tongue.

She would spend the night here in sight of the summit of... oh, she should know what it was called. Her father would be ashamed that she couldn't remember geography. Whatever it was, there was something about its bareness and the beautiful panorama below her that made her feel it was the right place to be, and not a bad place to die if, by chance, Felix decided to come for her. She burrowed into a little crevice to sleep, but as the sun sank she started to shiver. She didn't have a sweater or a blanket, and the wind swung mercilessly from the west against the face of the mountain, whistling shrilly in her ears. She climbed down.

At this point, she might as well just run all the way there. If she went north she could be in Toulouse by dawn. She was tired but it seemed worth it, just to get there. She'd made the Debhis wait a day too long already.

The only problem was that she had only visited the Toulouse house once. She had to concede, after the third time ending up in the middle of an empty field where she had been _sure_ the house would be, that she no longer had any idea where it was.

She kicked at the ground and swore under her breath. Waiting until daylight and asking around wasn't an option—it would attract far too much attention and her family might somehow find out. They had someone in town come out to clean the house every couple of weeks, and word might get back to Scotland. She was going back to her family, but she wanted to do it on her terms. The thought of all eight of them showing up on the doorstep unannounced made her want to throw up. She sat down in the dirt and pressed her hands to her temples.

_Where was it? _

She remembered a shopping trip one cloudy day with Aunt Rosalie—picking up some door handles Esme had reserved and then a _lot_ of pastries, just for Nessie. "You are not telling your parents about this," Rosalie had said, one eyebrow drawn down for emphasis. She remembered all the colorful awnings, the sculpture in the street outside the _pâtisseri_e, their walk to the World War One Memorial while Nessie gorged herself on a mille-feuille...

And then they had gone home. Right.

She sprang up from the ground and ran back into the city, navigating the narrow streets as best she could until she found the memorial. It was smaller than in her memory but still imposing, lit from below by giant squares of light set into the ground. A hundred dead, empty faces tangled together in a stone-rendered mass grave rising high above her head. There was no one else admiring its solemn grandeur—it had to be at least four in the morning. She closed her eyes again, calling on her memory. They had crossed the street, and the bridge, and then turned left...

Twenty minutes later she stood with her hand on the worn wooden fence that lined the road along her family's property. The house sat a hundred yards from her, covered in climbing summer vines and looking, despite the family's long absence, like it had been breathed out of her memories. Gravel crunched beneath her feet as she followed the meandering drive to the front door. She knocked three times. No answer.

"Hello?" she called, realizing she might be waking them up. "It's me. It's Nessie. I'm here."

When no one came to the door she twisted the handle. Locked.

She wandered around the side of the house, wondering if they were up early and outside. Dew dampened the hem of her skirt as she walked to the edge of the woods behind the house, softly calling Fatima's name. There was no one there.

She turned back and saw a curtain fluttering in the breeze from a broken bedroom window on the ground floor. Fatima, at least, had made it here and broken her way in. The thought filled Nessie with relief.

The glass scattered on the cobbled patio crunched unpleasantly beneath her feet, reminding her of the riots. She climbed gingerly through the broken window, landing in Jasper and Alice's old bedroom. The blue coverlet on the four-poster bed was thrown back, Fatima's pictures arranged in a neat row on the nightstand.

"Hello?" she called again. She wandered out into the hallway and stopped short on the threshold of Esme's blue french country distressed kitchen. They were sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the bay window before them at the countryside. But they were too still, their arms to stiff, their eyes to glassy.

They were both dead.

It couldn't be right. It was a mistake. "Fatima...?"

She ran to the table and shook her friend's shoulders, calling her name again. Fatima's hair fell back and Nessie saw them—the neat, bloodless puncture wounds piercing Fatima's jugular vein in the unmistakable half-moon mark of a vampire.

They had been drained, cleaned, posed for her. So she would find them.

She turned for a moment to where Abdul sat in his chair, face vacant and hands empty. She pushed away from the table and stumbled outside, sniffing, catching a hint of familiar venom on the air.

She'd been wrong. He wasn't following her—he was ten steps ahead. He knew exactly how to get to her, knew just where she was going and who she'd sent before her and why.

They were dead. She had to do something. She couldn't just leave them sitting at the kitchen table until their bodies... until they started to... it was summertime. Her teeth were chattering. She needed a shovel. In the shed, maybe.

The shed was locked. She broke the door and shoved her way through piles of rusty tools until she found a shovel leaning against the back wall. How deep would she have to make the hole so animals couldn't get them? Six feet... everyone always did six feet. She broke ground in the middle of the lawn, flinging dirt haphazardly behind her. How were Muslims supposed to be buried? She didn't even know. All she could remember was that their tombstones were slender, tall, at least twice as high as the ones Christians used and wide at the top...

They were still in there, sitting at the table. They were never going to look at her again or say anything or smile or open the storage door she had so much trouble closing.

She didn't have... she didn't have a box. She needed a box. She couldn't just toss them in the ground. She went back to the shed but she couldn't find any wood, and she didn't know how to make a coffin, anyway. She started to cry.

She climbed back through the broken window and into Fatima's bedroom. She tore the coverlet off the bed so viciously that she ripped it down the middle, scattering down feathers and throw pillows everywhere. She tugged out the white sheet beneath and balled it up, shoving it under her left arm. She went to her parents' bedroom for another one.

She didn't want to go back to the kitchen. When the hallway took a turn and the blue cabinets came into view, she thought that maybe they would be gone. The kitchen table would be empty, and she could sit there and wait for them to come back from the walk they were on. Yes.

But they were there, just as they'd been left. She dropped the sheets and sank to the floor, pressing her face into the wall. This couldn't be real.

She had thought she was so clever. She had thought she could keep them safe. Everything she had done seemed stupid now, reckless. She had sent them to die. This was her fault. She couldn't leave them at the kitchen table.

She uncurled herself and spread the sheets on the ground. She lifted Abdul first, as carefully as she could, and placed him on the floor in the middle of the white fabric. Next, she hooked her arms around Fatima's legs and shoulders and lowered her from her chair, willing her to come alive again, to breathe, to say something. She tried to close their eyes and cross their arms over their chests but it wouldn't work—they were still too stiff to move very well. She wrapped and tucked the sheets as best she could, wishing that she didn't have to cover their faces.

She tripped over the step to the patio as she carried Abdul outside and almost fell and dropped him. When she had them both lying, shrouded and white, beside her hole she realized she had never finished digging it. It was only a few feet deep.

This seemed like an insurmountable problem. She sat down and stayed there, beside the hole, for a very long time—until she realized it was dark. She picked up her shovel and started digging again. When her head was below the level of the ground she crawled part way up and reached for one of the shrouded figures, pulling at it until she could get a good grip and lower it to the floor of the grave. When she climbed up again for the second one she realized that she hadn't thought to make it big enough for two people, but they fit. She climbed out and filled the hole in without pausing to see them down there, side by side.

And then she sat again, tears leaking, and didn't sleep.

oOo

They were coming for her. They would kill her, just like they had killed Abdul and Fatima. They would find the worst, worst way to punish her for interfering.

Cats with a mouse.

They must still not know who she was, otherwise they would have...

_ ...____No._

She stared at her family's sprawling Midi-Pyrénées retreat, heart pounding, stomach disappearing.

This was her family's house.

She had led the Volturi straight to her family's house.

There was no way they didn't know to whom this property belonged. She had just implicated her whole family in what she was doing. That one little excuse the Volturi had been waiting for... she had just handed it over. Felix was probably back in Volterra already, palm open for his master to share everything he'd seen—the Cullens, sabotaging their financial operations. Demetri could find them in Scotland in a matter of hours.

Her family was going to be obliterated.

She paced the grass in absolute terror. She had to warn them. The Volturi would know how to sidestep Alice's visions—no one would be able to tell them what was coming. And it would all be her fault. Just like last time, only this time there would be no army of witnesses to stop time, to give them a chance. Not that they would have a chance.

She took off like a blur for the road, knowing all the while that it was absolutely useless. She was nowhere near fast enough to get there in time. Even if she could, where could they go? What could they do? She had doomed all of them with her childish vigilante act. They'd had no idea where she even was, nothing to do with any of it...

She drew up short at a bend in the road, a strange feeling creeping down her arms at this thought.

_Never be Nessie Cullen again._

Alice's prophecy rang through Nessie's head with a triple force of undeniable truth. This was it. This was the moment she thought she had found back in September. This was the time to never be Nessie Cullen again.

Aro had wanted her in his coven once before. If she made it clear that she'd renounced the Cullens almost a year ago, that she had run away and been living on her own, if she pleaded ignorance and begged forgiveness, and asked to join the guard...

Maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't kill everyone she cared about.

How quickly could she get to Volterra?

She felt the beginnings of an empty smile. At least she knew how to get to the train station.


	12. Chapter 11

Clack clack.

Clack _clack_ clack clack. Clack _clack_ clack clack.

The rhythm of this train was working its way inside her skull.

She'd gotten a window seat that she couldn't appreciate. There was no one else in her row—she had tossed her backpack onto the seat beside her and everyone had gotten the message left by the battered bag with a few books spilling out.

Stay away.

Her forehead bumped softly against the window as the train swayed its way across the border. She was still hours from Volterra, and she was so exhausted she wondered if she might finally be able to fall asleep. Her skirt was stained with dirt from grave digging and her hair hadn't been brushed in days. She noticed this but did nothing about it. No one attempted to make conversation.

It was strange, feeling nothing but tiredness. She had burned through so many emotions over the course of the past few hours, and now it seemed like she had reached the base of her inner wick-her thoughts simply curled up in lazy, insubstantial smoke.

On the trip from Toulouse to Marseilles she'd been seething, tapping her fingers in impotent rage.

_Four trains? Fifteen hours?_

_FOUR trains?_

_They'll be dead by the time I get there. They'll die before any of them can even figure out it was my fault. _

Continental Europe was apparently not the paradise of public transportation she'd been led to believe. Or at least France wasn't. The train seemed to be barely moving as she ground her teeth and tapped at her armrest. It was going to take her all day to get to Volterra, a day in which she could only hope the Volturi would bide their time, make a plan. Thanks to Nessie's mother the Cullens were a formidable foe, and even with an ironclad excuse the Guard wouldn't want to just waltz into Scotland. Not after last time.

Even when she got off her final train, she'd have no idea where to go from there. Yet another thing they'd all assumed she'd never need to know—how to get to Volterra. It was somewhere south of Pisa. Wherever that was. And since she'd be arriving sometime late on a Sunday night, she'd have no luck with a bus.

She'd spent the ride from Marseilles to Nice fighting back nausea and planning her speech.

_I've come to offer myself..._

_Hello, my name is Renesmee. I've left my family and I want to join the Guard..._

_I had no idea those cars were yours. _

_Please don't kill me._

Now, on the leg from Nice to Genoa, she had nothing. And nothing was better. Nothing was much better than thinking about why there was dirt under her fingernails.

She was hungry, but there was no time at the stops to go hunting and she couldn't use the dining car—she had no more money. She'd barely been able to afford the ticket, and when she got off in Pisa she didn't know what it would take to get the rest of the way to Volterra. In her experience everything cost money, especially the things you weren't planning.

Her head snapped up as she realized she had fallen alseep—how briefly, she couldn't tell. Had they crossed the border yet? She craned her neck to the side to catch the very edges of the horizon outside her window. She had traveled so little in her life that even now, totally desperate and past the edges of exhaustion, she felt a stirring of interest at the idea of entering a new country.

Nessie and her mother were the only two Cullens who hadn't traveled the world like it was one giant playground. Bella was still very young, compared to the rest, and she and Nessie both entered the family around the time when life suddenly got very, very dangerous for Cullens and anyone who was friends with them.

Nessie had only ever really seen Canada, England, and France. She would have loved to see more of Europe but with the Volturi so close they stayed in France and she never got to see Switzerland, Austria, Germany, anything. She had often begged her parents to let her go down to South America and visit Zafrina and Nahuel and see the island Carlisle bought for Esme such a long time ago, but whenever she asked they just quietly told her that now probably wasn't the time...

"Prudent" was a very good word to describe the Cullens after their near-disastrous encounter with the Volturi. They all realized how little it took, when the ill will of Aro was bent their way, for the Guard and a host of witnesses to descend with righteous fury, no matter how unjust their cause might be. With Alice's foresight and Bella's shield they felt fairly secure just continuing their lives, but they were far more careful than they'd been before.

So, when Nessie wanted to go see more of Zafrina's pretty pictures and meet the rest of Nahuel's siblings (half-vampires, just like she was), they smiled at her and said "someday, sweetheart." She knew what that meant. It meant "no."

They had set the Volturi on a trail to Joham and his master-race experiments, and there was no telling which members of the Guard might be down there, and what it might look like to Aro if they stumbled across the Cullens consorting with Joham's illegal, dubiously-bred family.

So, they had stayed in Washington. All that work to protect her and she'd hunkered down in France and stumbled straight into the middle of the viper nest. What a stupid, terrible way to pay back all that loving caution, so many people simply desperate to keep her safe. She clenched her teeth and pressed her hands into the soft flesh of her stomach, wishing she could stab herself there. She saw Jacob's face in her mind's eye, impassive and disappointed, and pressed a little bit harder.

No one else on the train seemed to notice her odd behavior—they were all either asleep or deeply involved in their phones. She thought, not for the first time, of the phone numbers shoved in the front pocket of her backpack. She had almost just called them, warned them. Said, "I'm sorry, it's all my fault but they're coming and you have to get ready." She'd been halfway to making the call instead of getting on the train, but she remembered with haunting clarity those weeks at the beginning of her life when they had mustered their friends and prepared to face their enemy—more than anything, she remembered her mother's secret preparations, the passports and the seriousness, the way Alice clued her in with a book she had to burn, the way she kept it all from anyone Aro could touch...

If she had learned one thing in those weeks, it was that every word could have a thousand unseen consequences. If she called her family, the Volturi would know about it. If they knew about it, they would have no reason to believe the story that was her one hope for saving them—that she had nothing to do with them anymore. A phone call that would lead to a little more organization before death, or a surprise that—if she could forestall it—]=might never happen at all? The choice was obvious.

And yet, if she failed, if they killed her family anyway, she would regret this choice forever. With a little warning, some of them might live. No warning, and there was no question that they'd all die.

She could only hope they'd understand that she _had_ to stake her every chance on this. They had to understand. Alice would, at least. She'd know.

Jacob... was Jacob even there with them? Alice said he went back to La Push all the time, that he hated Scotland. He might escape this whole thing. She leaned forward and pressed her fists to her stomach again, lips moving silently save for the whisper of air in her mouth.

_Please. Please be gone. Please be back on the Rez with Billy and your pack. Please, please, don't ever go back to Scotland again. Just race Paul and Embry to the Yukon and back and build a new front ramp on your house for your dad and never, ever tangle yourself up with my family again. You deserve so much more than this. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I'm your imprint... that you're tied to everything you were supposed to hate. I should have known it would turn out like this—a shape-shifter stuck in a family full of vampires. Just get out, get out and don't come back and they won't bother with you. They'll have no reason to. Please, please. _

_ Please._

Her eyelids were squeezed shut so tightly she saw stars behind them. She wiped her nose with the edge of her skirt so she wouldn't draw any attention by sniffling, and looked once again out the window. There was nothing else for her to do.

oOo

There was one more train for her to take before she could disembark for good and try to find her way from Pisa to Volterra. The Genoa-Pisa trip was short, fortunately, but full of a large group of very rowdy American backpackers. She huddled into a far corner of the train car and tried to ignore them. Their boisterous happiness made them almost as threatening as their physical similarity to herself—these alien creatures were her peers. And she was covered in dirt. For the first time in several days she gave a thought to her appearance, and she was mortified.

They were speaking English like they had no idea anyone else on the train might know it. Hearing it again for the first time in so long made it difficult for her to pretend she was alone. There was one boy, louder than the rest. With her eyes on the floor she could see him, at the edge of her vision—blond, green-eyed, straight-toothed smile. He was laughing with his seat companion (a shorter boy with buzzed hair and a paint-spattered shirt), and his fingers were tangled in the dark, wavy hair of the girl sitting in front of him, who was writing in a journal with a small smile on her face.

Nessie tilted her chin a little bit. She could see pale hair on his muscular forearm, veins running along his wrist as his fingers wound one long, brown curl over and over between his knuckles. Something about him made her want to either stand up and toss her hair back or tuck into a ball so small she wouldn't even exist anymore.

She tried a little harder to ignore him.

She sighed when she stepped off, pushed forward by a sea of teenagers in the direction of the leaning tower, which was apparently lit up at night and looked pretty spectacular, or something. She fought her way out in the other direction, feeling a little bit like a salmon and worried a bloodlust sickness was going to come over her again. When she found herself alone on a narrow side street with a cat she exhaled loudly and looked around her. It was full dark, and palpably warmer than France. Italy. She was here, in Italy. Volterra was only miles away—she had almost made it.

The first thing she had to do was clean up her appearance a little bit, so that when she asked someone for help or directions or a ride she wouldn't look like a terrifying, mentally-ill vagrant. She reached into the side pocket of her backpack and pulled out the few coins she still had left. How was she possibly going to get herself clean and get to Volterra, just on this? There had to be somewhere she could use a restroom—wash her face and comb her hair, change into her other top and shake some of the dirt out of her skirt... why hadn't she just done it on the train? She sighed and let her head fall forward to the wall. She couldn't believe how stupid she was. Unless she pulled it together and calmed down, she was just going to keep making mistakes like this.

_Just find a restroom. A free one, if you're lucky._

A few minutes and some well-chosen Italian later, she emerged from the back room of a small bar with a new shirt, a face scrubbed with liquid soap, and her hair in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She wandered here and there through the more touristy-looking part of the city until she found a small trinket shop still open, with a rack display of maps in English and German. She told the man at the register that she wanted to visit Volterra tomorrow and he produced a color coded fold-out map, tracing his finger down what he assured her was the quickest route through Ponsacco. She listened halfheartedly—she indented to stay well away from the road. There was a tense moment when she pulled out her coins and was a bit short for the map, but she must have looked truly pathetic or spoke very impressive Italian for an American girl because he gave it to her and waved away her breathless thanks.

She took off, energized by the closeness of her destination and the fact that it was not yet the next day. She'd gotten here as fast as she could, and now she would run until her legs fell off. That wouldn't be necessary, though—the man in the shop had said the drive would only be an hour and a half, so she'd be there in minutes.

She ended up staying a little closer to the road than she would have liked because she couldn't figure out any other way to make sure she was going the right direction. She kept her eyes on the waxing and waning headlights on the ribbon of pavement below her, drunk on her proximity to her final goal. The night was quiet and warm, the gentle silence broken occasionally by the whine of an engine accelerating.

As the great, walled stone city rose into the landscape at the top of a distant hill, silver and majestic in the light of a full moon, she felt a weird urge to slow down and walk. After everything she'd done to get here as quickly as she could, after all the trains and the foot tapping and wanting to tear out her hair and running at her full speed through the unfamiliar Italian countryside, she was suddenly reluctant.

If they killed her, she might not even have a chance to feel anything—she remembered how quickly they had killed Irina, with a screech and a flash of fire. Would it be that simple for her? She hoped so. Would they treat her family the same way? They would have to—the Cullens would be too dangerous to play around with, once cornered.

She slowed to a walk as she climbed the final hill and drew closer to the wall. She placed a hand against the rock and waited for the guards to drop like silent, cloaked stones and surround her. This was it. These vampires had killed the humans she loved most for no good reason whatsoever, for spite. To warn her. The Debhis' lives were no more valuable to the Volturi than bright red paint would be for a threatening sign. They should be her bitterest eternal enemies, and she was about to make a play for spending at least the next millennium helping them keep it up.

Her mother's face, her father's, her grandmother, her aunts... they bloomed in her mind one by one and hovered in the darkness before her, and she knew that no matter what had been done to Abdul and Fatima, she had to do whatever she could to save her family. "I'm sorry," she whispered to both of them. "If I could have stopped them, I promise I would have."

She closed her eyes.

Nothing happened.

Disconcerted, she ran down along the wall, the fingers of her left hand still trailing along the stone, until she reached the road and entered Volterra.

It was still the dead of night, and the streets were empty. Had the guard already seen her? Did they know she was here? They must.

She slowed her pace and wandered down a cobbled street, not sure where she was supposed to go. Her footsteps seemed to echo like a bass drum in the midnight silence. She was at a loss... she hadn't thought past this point. She had expected them to swoop down the moment she crossed the threshold of their domain, but no one had stopped her. No one made themselves known now as she paced up and down the maze of medieval streets, following the plashing music of running water. It led her, eventually, to a large fountain in what looked like the town square. She turned in every direction, clenching her fists in frustration. She knew the Volturi lived beneath the city, but she hadn't thought she would need to get there on her own.

The water echoed merrily in the empty space, the fountain lit from beneath like the war memorial in Toulouse. The silence was disturbing—it was the precise opposite of the darkness in the suburbs of Paris. There were no cars honking, no music blaring, nothing to disturb the ear or eye. There wasn't even laundry fluttering in the night breeze, nothing but the stone and the perfectly manicured vines and the quiet fountain that they never turned off.

Hairs rose on the back of Nessie's exposed neck. This was the safest place in the world for the humans who lived here, unaware of the evil sitting right beneath them, evil that never hesitated to tear the rest of the world apart to preserve this peaceful sanctuary unmolested for themselves, to rake in money and power and build this city higher and higher and... she wondered what this courtyard looked like in the day, full of contented humans going about their daily business.

Her father had tried to kill himself right here, hadn't he? He had stepped out from beneath the shadows of the clock tower. Was that what she would have to do to get them to acknowledge her? Cause a scene? She could almost see him there, palms up and eyes closed, just like every time she'd heard the story of her parents' romance.

As though she had summoned them, two cloaked figures materialized beneath the clock tower precisely where she had imagined Edward standing, waiting to die. In an indiscernible moment they were in front of her—two men, both a full head taller than she was.

"Your business here?" one of them asked her. She couldn't meet his gaze—his hood was drawn too low, but she saw his crimson lips moving.

"I would like to speak with the Brothers," she said, willing her voice steady.

"The brothers do not take audiences from any nomad who asks for their attention. Your presumption places you in danger."

Her intaken breath was a bit too sharp. "You can hear my heart beating. You know who I am. My name is Renesmee, and I would like to speak with the Brothers." Almost no quavering that time. Well done.

The lips curved into a slight smile. "You were not expected. The Brothers have nothing to say to you, though they are aware of your family's treachery and we have been instructed to keep you here, now that you have arrived."

Nessie started to panic. "I have things to tell them, important things that they don't know. I've come to share information."  
The other vampire, the one who hadn't spoken yet, turned to the other and said in a surprisingly soft voice, "So eager to betray them. It must be a family trait, perhaps?"

She wanted to spit on him. She swallowed and set her teeth. "You will regret not allowing me to speak with them," she ground out.

The soft-voiced vampire growled. "No half-bred child will speak to the Volturi in that way. We were attempting to be merciful, but I've changed my mind. Let's speak to the brothers directly, shall we? They are indeed eager to see you again. We had thought to spare you—my companion found your scent rather pleasant as you entered. But, he is strong enough to bear your loss, I'm sure. It would be our pleasure to let the Master enjoy you instead."

She could only follow them out of the square and into the shadows, hoping wildly that they were bluffing.

Neither of them said a word to her as they flanked her, gripping her upper arms and marching her down the street to a manhole, clearly expecting her to jump. She landed soundlessly in a dripping tunnel and felt their hands again almost instantly, propelling her forward down the dank, narrow passage to a wrought-iron gate that clanged shut behind them with a finality that made Nessie want to turn around and run back to France. The vampire to her right opened a door and let in a flood of fluorescent light.

At the sight of the bland, generic hallway before her Nessie passed a hand over her eyes, wondering if she'd started to hallucinate. The walls were a bland eggshell color, the carpet a steely gray with flecks of crimson. There was an elevator, and a fake frond in a terracotta pot. It was the last thing she expected.

The elevator opened into a sleek, wood paneled office with a tall counter like a hotel desk. The woman behind it raised her head as the elevator doors closed behind them.

She was lovely, with deeply tanned skin and hair darker than Nessie's mother's, swept up into a french twist. There were two perfect, white pearls in each of her ears, her lips red enough to match a vampire's—but she was most definitely human. Nessie could hear her heartbeat across the room.

"You're looking tired, Gianna. Perhaps you should get some _sleep."_

The beautiful face contorted into a humorless smile. "I'm fine, thank you. Coffee." She lifted a white mug and saluted him.

The blond vampire smiled at her. With his hood thrown back Nessie could see the sharp planes of his blanched face. "Such a fortunate substance, coffee. Almost enough to make one feel immortal,"

The bitter smile froze in place. "Is this guest expected?"

"No need to buzz us in," said the other vampire, his hood still obscuring the top half of his features.

A slight pressure to Nessie's shoulder sent her forward through a set of double doors and down another hallway. She had lost all hope of finding her way out again.

This whole situation was absolutely surreal—the standard American office building, complete with attractive human receptionist. The weeping tunnels. The gold leaf over the doors. It was too strange to be real.

And yet the iron grips encasing her either arm were no illusion, and she had finally recognized the stature and voice of the soft-voiced vampire who kept his hood up. It was Demetri, the one who could find anyone, anywhere. The one her mother had been most afraid of when she sent Nessie and Jacob away, the one they had to kill if anyone was going to survive.

Hope sprang so fast it almost made her dizzy, but it was followed by a plunging fear that sent her heart into her stomach. Demetri was absolutely necessary to destroying the Cullens, and he was here. Either she had come in time and nothing had been done yet, or they were all already dead.

One of those.

The vampires to either side of her gave nothing away—they had spent all of their cruelty in the square, and were back to the stoic, emotionless persona that she'd always thought of when she imagined the Guard. Iterations of a single, large organism, without a will of their own. She failed to suppress her shudder.

Down the hallway. Over a threshold and into another medieval world of cold, age-old stone. A massive pair of wooden doors large enough to rival the Cathedral in St. Denis. But no heaven in the rafters, here.

Demetri pounded thrice and then pushed the doors open to reveal the throne room. Three massive chairs sat in the only circle of light in the place—a low-hung chandelier with wires reaching all the way up to the circular ceiling. The rest of the room was bare, yellowed stone interrupted only by the tiny slits high on the walls that arrows would be shot from, if this were the sort of place anyone would ever attack.

It was one step down from the hallway into the throne room, but of course neither Demetri or the other vampire mentioned that. With her eyes high on the walls she stumbled, but righted herself quickly and looked frantically around, hoping absurdly that maybe no one had noticed. There were a few gray-cloaked vampires standing around the circular room, but the thrones were empty. She exhaled a shaky breath—after preparing herself to face Aro and Caius, she was completely thrown by their not being present.

The blond vampire turned to look at her. "We will wait as long as it pleases the Brothers to keep us."

She turned her eyes to the floor. She'd been here fifteen minutes and she was already weary of the mind games. She was not cut out for this. Who did she think she was, trying to spar with these vampires? She was a six year old half-vampire who drank animal blood and had left home for the first time less than twelve months ago. They were older than this city—millenia old, infinitely stronger and more clever. At least she would not be feigning her terrified pleas for mercy. Those would need to be genuine, for Aro.

Minutes passed, every vampire standing as still as the stones beneath them. Despite her apprehension Nessie's mind began to wander to dangerous places.

Fatima, Abdul. More silent than these statuesque immortals, and forever. A shallow grave hundreds of miles from their home.

_Murderers. Soulless, power hungry murderers. Choke on your ambition and die in your own flames. _

That was not going to be helpful when Aro took her hand.

She bit the inside of her cheek. She was trying not to lose this depraved staring contest they seemed to be engaged in—she wouldn't twitch, she wouldn't sigh. She had to breathe, though. They didn't.

After what seemed like several hours but was probably just another ten or fifteen agonizing minutes, a door across the room swung open and before she could gather herself, before she could even be afraid, Aro strode right in.

"So it's true, then? The Cullen child is really here."

He looked just as she remembered—ruby eyes glittering, black hair flowing down his shoulders, skin white and just a little more papery than it ought to be. Ancient but not old. He was smiling at her.

She lowered her head. "I've come to explain myself, sir."

He didn't say anything for a moment. She didn't look back up.

"I must say I am rather impressed that you came all the way here from... somewhere in France, was it?"

"Toulouse," she whispered.

"Yes, of course. A long journey for one without the full complement of vampiric powers."

He paused, waiting for her to react. She took the opportunity to speak, spilling every word she'd practiced on the train. "Everything I did... I was completely unaware of your involvement in the work when I was interfering. I haven't broken any laws about revealing myself, and I didn't knowingly mess things up or defy you or anything like that and...and I renounced my entire family a year ago. They had no idea where I was, let alone what I was doing. They were completely uninvolved in this... I've changed my name, it's not even Cullen anymore, it's Teintée, and I think that when we last met you were interested in knowing more about me, once you decided not to destroy me, and as there are so few like me I thought that perhaps I would offer myself to you to repay the trouble I've caused, maybe to become a member of the Guard if you think I could..."

"None," Aro said.

"I'm sorry?" asked Nessie.

"None like you, child. You are entirely unique."

"Well, the few in Brazil, we both met one of them..."

"I'm afraid they became more of a problem than expected. The one who was creating them, he was entirely too dangerous. They had to be taken care of. Very unpleasant."

"All..all of them?"

"It was regrettable, of course," he said, inclining his head. "It appears that all of these half-bred creatures are more trouble than we were assured they would be."

Nessie's eyes widened. He was going to kill her. She'd stepped right into this, just like she'd stepped right into letting them kill Abdul and Fatima.

"But as I was saying," continued Aro, completely unconcerned, "it means that you, Miss Renesmee, are entirely unique in the world." She saw the hungry gleam in his eye and realized with a jolt of hope that she still had a chance. He was a collector, and she was the only one of her kind left.

"I take as little notice as possible of the affairs my Guard conducts to ensure our continued solvency, but even I am aware of the degree of trouble you have caused one of our most intricate operations, to the frustration of my trusted servant Felix."

"I... I know. Like I said before, I had no idea. I thought they were just human criminals. I was trying to keep my neighborhood safe..."

Aro interrupted her with a hearty, chill-inducing chuckle. "Oh, you are indeed an oddity, aren't you? I am most certainly not disappointed. You have inherited all the eccentricity of your forebears, and yet you have no interest in remaining part of their coven? You are their biological offspring, my dear. This decision seems a bit rash, perhaps motivated by a desire to shield them from the consequences of your actions?"

"Yes," she said. There was no use lying. "They had nothing to do with this and however you're planning to punish them... it's not necessary or warranted. Your only interest is justice, I'm sure." She raised her eyes. He was still smiling pleasantly.

"I'm happy to show you," she continued. "The evidence is available in my mind."

She could see him thinking, calculating. He wouldn't want to give up this chance he'd waited for. But he would want her, and he might be willing to hold off and wait for another moment if he could have the Cullens' little princess instead. She didn't think she was overvaluing herself to his strange mind. And, in Vampire Time, that "next moment" might be years and years away. Time for hundreds of things to change.

Aro held out his nearly translucent fingers. For a brief moment she was reminded of the priest who had absolved her of murder, slicing a similar set of fingers through the air. She stepped closer to him and a tremor seemed to run through the vampires grouped in the room. One silver-haired woman in particular narrowed her eyes and bared her teeth. Nessie hesitated.

"It's all right, dear ones," said Aro. "This one is so weak she is practically human. I'm in no danger, I assure you." His servants relaxed minutely at his words, though they were all still looking at her like they wanted to eat her. They probably did.

She took another step and, ignoring Aro's outstretched fingers, placed her hand carefully on his bony shoulder. "You forget," she said. "I can show you."

And she did. She closed her eyes and unleashed a river of memory, starting with that first ballet class and on through her discovery of Jacob's passion for her mother and the murder she committed and her screaming match with her parents and plunging herself into the Sound with a backpack and a heart full of righteous anger, and she felt Aro's fingers rise and curl around her own, and every other thought she hadn't shared was pulled out through her arm like a drain had been unplugged, but it was all right... she had expected this... she watched thoughts rush past in chaos, thoughts of hunting and sitting at the edge of a mountain and breaking the door to the barn in her search for a shovel. Her hand jerked as she saw a flicker of herself touching her own naked body in front of the Debhis' attic mirror, but Aro's grip was too strong. Jacob's lips, not real but all the times she'd thought about them. The look she had imagined seeing in his eyes...her hand jerked again and Aro's fingers pressed down harder.

A moment later it was over. She heard Aro sigh as his hand fell away, and she opened her eyes. His smile was still in place; he had come to a decision.

"I have always tried to impress upon my dear friend Carlisle the unnatural nature of his choices. It stands to reason such dogma would do a unique young mind such as yours a great deal of damage."

She pulled her hand away from his shoulder, severing their connection entirely before her uncharitable mental response could make its way to him.

"And you are still incredibly confused, I see. Determined to deny your nature, prowling the streets to protect humans from themselves to make up for being a threat to them yourself... this is the sort of madness I have become accustomed to seeing in the members of your former family." He paused for effect. "And I may truly say that, may I not? Your _former_ family? You are not exaggerating when you say you have severed your ties with them, and your willingness to turn to us instead is genuine."

Nessie didn't respond.

"You are right, of course, when you say that my first desire is justice. Justice, order, rule of law—that is the burden we have taken upon ourselves. It is a sacred trust that I would never violate. Your family, clearly, was uninvolved in your ill-considered actions. I imagine losing you to such immoral beings as ourselves would be more than retribution enough, in any case."

And there it was again. That gleam in his eye as he no doubt imagined the Cullen reaction to her defection. She was right—taking Nessie from her family was going to satisfy his epic grudge for now. She tried not to let her relief show on her face.

"And, of course, I should make it known to all those present... but where are Caius and Marcus? This is rather important business, after all." A cloaked figure vanished and rematerialized, and in a moment the door was creaking open to admit the other two most powerful vampires in the world—the youthful, empty Marcus and the sneering, wrinkled Caius. They took their places in their chairs before Aro spoke.

"Miss Renesmee... was it Teintée, my dear?" Nessie nodded her head.

"Miss Renesmee Teintée, formerly Cullen, is interested in joining us. I'd like to announce that it is clear to me she was indeed unaware that it was our own Felix she set herself against in Paris, and that she would not have involved herself at all, otherwise. It is my feeling she would be an asset to us, and that we ought to take her pledge. What say the two of you?"

Marcus stared at Nessie for a moment, unblinking, and then turned to Aro and simply shrugged his shoulders. Aro seemed to take this as the closest thing to a gesture of assent he would receive, and turned to Caius, whose lips were pulled back slightly from his teeth.

"I had thought, brother," he spat, "that we had made the decision to remove every upstart member of her human-loving coven for this."

"Ah, yes, well... it seems she has been a nomad for the past year. Their ridiculous lifestyle has broken the poor girl, I'm afraid. She's been on her own for many months now and it would be most imprudent to exercise judgment on an entirely innocent coven, you must see that." There was the weight of a great hint behind his words that Caius couldn't miss, though he snarled and turned for the door in a flourish of crimson robes.

As with Marcus, Aro seemed to take Caius's parting gesture for a vote of confidence, and he turned to Nessie and clapped his hands. "There you are, my dear. This should please you greatly, I imagine. Joining the guard is the greatest of honors, and it is quite rare for us to accept unexpected petitions such as this one. Renata will see to it that you are settled in, and tomorrow when more of the guard are gathered we shall take your pledge. We will be feeding tomorrow, as well, so you won't need to remain hungry for long."

_Good god. _"Oh, no, no, I... I intend to stick to my original diet."

Aro smiled indulgently at her. "You may do whatever you like, of course. There is plenty of...ah...small game hereabouts. As I said, Renata will arrange everything. You'll always be welcome at our meals of course, should you decide that your current habits no longer suit you."

Nessie inclined her head.

"Much to do, now. We shall see you again tomorrow, of course." And he was gone. It was startling, seeing the brothers move like vampires. It seemed as though their age and station should prohibit them from moving at lightning speed the way their soldiers always did. All three of the brothers gave off an aura of absolute power, even Marcus. They were kings in the world of the superhuman, ageless and infinite, and as Aro passed Nessie locked her knees so she wouldn't sink to the floor.

A dusky woman with long black hair who had to be Renata stepped forward as the door closed behind Aro. Her eyes were nearly black—they must all be hungry if they were scheduled to feed tomorrow.

She raised one black eyebrow. "I'll show you to your room, and we'll find you something to wear."

Nessie didn't know what to say, so she bowed her head and did her best imitation of meekness in following Renata through another door and down a corridor.

"You have no sort of permission to enter anyone's rooms unless they expressly invite you. We hope you'll be comfortable, but I'm sure you understand that we provide the best accommodation for our most loyal, valuable, and long-standing members. Such allegiance to the Guard is always rewarded."

"Okay..." said Nessie. Renata was looking at her as though convinced Nessie would never in any way warrant a room upgrade. That was fine with her. The worst room in this underground palace was bound to be nicer than the Debhis' attic. She felt an ache of longing for that place and the girl who had shared it with her, an ache so terrible she was afraid she might start leaking tears, but she bit her cheek again and followed Renata down several different hallways and into a spacious room with a plush rose rug, a few armchairs, and a painting of a volcano. There was a gold-framed mirror on the opposite wall—Nessie was surprised to see her own pale, thin face, hair pulled severely back at her temples. Her shirt was wrinkled, her skirt stained, her eyes hollow beneath purple circles. Beside her, Renata looked like Aphrodite.

"This should serve you well enough. There's a dresser in the corner, over there. It's empty now but I'll check your measurements and have robes for you in a few hours. Is there anything else you need?"

"Ah, well... I..."

Renata just looked at her, clearly bored and ready to go back to standing like a statue in the throne room.

"It's just that I sleep."

"I'm sorry?"

"I sleep, like a human. For the whole night."

Renata's eyebrow went up again. "I see."

"The couch is fine for tonight and all but I might need something else later and I... I don't know when this ceremony is supposed to be but I haven't slept in a really long time and I don't know when I'll wake up so I might need someone to come get me when it's time..."

"I'll have it taken care of. You just... get some rest."

And she was gone, the hem of Nessie's skirt ruffling in the breeze raised at her passing.

* * *

A/N:

I have no decent excuse for the delay. All I'll say is this: During this hiatus I've completed the story, and have every chapter written in rough draft form. I am sorry I only replied to about half the reviews of the last chapter-I had to cut my losses and get down to writing without responding to all of them. I'll do better this time.

I will be leaving the country for six weeks and will have to walk to the next town to get to an internet connection, but I still plan to post as often as I can.

Thank you for sticking with me, here. You all have made this such a wonderful experience.


	13. Chapter 12

Nessie woke when she fell off the couch.

She pulled herself up off the floor, rubbing her right elbow and examining her surroundings. The wall sconces on either side of her door were still lit—she had fallen onto the couch and passed out without turning them off or taking off her clothes. She couldn't remember ever having been so exhausted in her life, even in the months when she was staying out all night in Paris. In the past two nights she'd barely shut her eyes once.

Her neck hurt. She raised her arms above her head and gave a halfhearted stretch only to discover that everything else hurt, as well. She had no idea how long she'd been sleeping or what time it was. This part of the palace didn't seem to have any windows, and her room had no clock. Renata had never come to get her. Renata would come and get her, right? She'd have no reason to thwart Aro's will...

It was so hard to tell, with these vampires, where scrupulous, selfless devotion to duty ended and personal vendetta began.

She should probably just get ready and wait. She needed to use the restroom so she wandered into her small bathroom— it was covered in white tile and held a sink, a mirror, and a boxed shower with frosted glass. There was no toilet. She realized suddenly that there was probably no toilet anywhere in the entire palace.

This was the thing—this missing and, at the moment, very necessary toilet that pushed her over the edge of the frantic, numb necessity with which she'd survived the past few days and into complete emotional overload.

She sank down onto the limited floor space in the bathroom, her mouth straining open in a silent howl as tears poured down her face. Her fingers scrabbled for something to clench at and she broke several nails as she dug two small, four-track divets through the pristine tile.

Her family... her family was safe, for now, but she still had so many reasons to be afraid. This place and everyone in it terrified her. She hated them and they knew it. They were fifty times stronger than she was and played games with her head that she'd never understand. Never, not even in the first days after she'd run away and hidden in the belly of a giant Spanish tanker had she felt so alone, wanted her parents so badly. The little girl inside her warring consciousness pushed her way to the front and cried and cried and cried.

oOo

She let it go on until she was absolutely exhausted and her face was level with the foot of the sink. She still had no idea what time it was and she really had to pee, but that was going to have to wait. She needed to change clothes.

She stood up and turned on the frigid tap. She splashed her face, frustrated at her tendency to get red-eyed and blotchy after she'd been crying. Her hair had tangled itself into a giant, ugly knot where her bun had been the night before, so she went back into her room to get her hairbrush from her backpack. She pulled it from the front pocket of her bag and lifted her eyes to the volcano on the opposite wall. The background of the painting was dark, as though it were moonless, gloomy midnight. The only light in the landscape came from the cascading waterfalls of liquid rock running like orangey blood down the slope of the mountain. She set her hairbrush on the couch, lifted the painting from its hook, and turned it to face the wall in the corner.

She took as much time as she could brushing her hair. When she'd been younger, it had been one of the most comforting feelings to her, her mother working through one section of Nessie's hair at a time, holding it loosely in her hand and stroking slowly, tugging lightly at the edges of Nessie's scalp. She sometimes asked Bella to do it more than once a day, and her mother had always said yes.

Now, she ran the brush inch by inch through her dirty hair, surprised at how long it had gotten. It was scraggly and dry, but it fell almost to her elbows. When she'd lived with her family her hair had always been perfect—sweet-smelling and treated with expensive rinses and conditioners, cut in layers so her curls looked fuller and framed her face just right, thanks to her aunt Rosalie. It had never been allowed to get this long.

She stepped out of her clothes and pulled open the door of the shower. It took her a few minutes to figure out how to turn the knob the right way but hot, glorious water soon beat down on her hand and she stepped in and closed her eyes, letting the water wash away all the dirt on her aching body. Her footprints left black marks on the floor of the shower.

When she was clean and had her hair wrapped up in the one plain, white towel she was able to find, she walked over to the wardrobe. She pulled it open and saw with a shiver that a gray robe and a black dress were hanging there, with a black pair of tights and patent black flats sitting at the bottom. Someone had come in here while she was sleeping. She pulled on the dress and the tights and was even more disturbed to find that they fit perfectly.

The tights were a bit itchy, as were the long sleeves of the dress. She fingered the heavy wool cloak still hanging in the wardrobe—was she supposed to wear it all the time, or only in the throne room and outside? If she walked out of her room with the cloak on, would she be the only one, or would she commit some grave faux pas by just wearing the dress and holding the cloak over her arm? She slipped her feet into the shoes and compromised by throwing on her cloak but leaving it unclasped. When she turned around she caught her own hollow eyes in the mirror—the sleep and shower had not made her look much better. The gray cloak framed her too-pale face, the dress a severe completion beneath. She looked, minus the red eyes, like a figure from her own nightmares.

She placed her hand on the doorknob, still watching her own face, and turned the handle. It was time to be an adult and face the consequences that other people had held off for her all her life. It seemed to her then that this had been her unavoidable destiny from the moment she was born, no matter how hard her family had tried to save her. Their day of triumph in that snowy field hadn't been the end of it.

This was. It didn't matter how much she hated it. It didn't matter that they had murdered her two dearest friends, her adopted family, for no reason. It didn't matter that she was now complicit in every evil act they committed.

Would her family ever have any idea what she had done for them, or would they feel totally betrayed? Would they write her off? Would they refuse to say her name any more, knowing what she'd chosen to do with herself?

This was, after all, the worst thing she could possibly do.

oOo

The hallway was empty, and she pulled the door closed behind her with a click that echoed down the corridor. There were doors like hers lining the hall as far as she could see in either direction, and she wasn't sure where she was supposed to go. She settled for going back the same direction she'd come with Renata, though she'd been so confused and exhausted last night she wasn't sure she remembered how to get back the way she'd come. The maze of this place seemed endless. She couldn't believe how big it was.

One turn, then another. Still she saw no one. She was coming to the end of her memory as she turned left at the elevator when she finally saw a cloaked figure standing at the other end of the hallway. She stopped walking, nervous. In a flash the vampire was before her, red eyes startlingly visible in a dark, narrow face.

"You're the half human," he said in Italian. He was smiling at her.

"Yes," she said, suppressing the urge to back up a step or two.

"I can hear your heart beating," he said, eyes widening as he examined her. "It's fascinating. There is venom _and_ blood in you, isn't there? I've never smelled anything like it."

She looked around as discreetly as she could for an escape route.

"And your eyes... just like a human's. I had heard your family's eyes are yellow."

"I'm not like them," she said hastily.  
The vampire raised his eyebrows. He wasn't terribly tall—about her height, and his eyes were slanted slightly in his face. She couldn't place his ethnicity or his accent, but she'd never seen anyone like him before.

"Call me Ze," he said, holding his hand out for her to shake.

"Ze?" she asked, not taking it.

He left his hand sitting there in front of her. "Yes, Aro chose it for me. I didn't know what my name was when I was invited to join the guard. Aro said it was fitting to my mysterious origins." He smiled again, showing his teeth.  
"Do they do that often, give new names to people?"  
"Are you asking if they're going to change yours?"  
She didn't respond.

"Sometimes," he said, finally dropping his unshaken hand. "Where are you going, half-vampire? Are you looking for someone?"

"I don't know. I was told I was supposed to take my oath today, but I don't know when, or where."  
"The throne room, of course. Everything of note happens there. Congratulations, child. They only take the best to safeguard our kind throughout the world."

She tried to say thank you but the words got stuck in her throat.

"I believe everyone is gathering there, though the oaths probably won't take place for another hour. Shall I accompany you?  
"Um, yes, please," she said. He fell into step beside her and they walked back the way he had come.

Nessie felt like she should ask him a question. "Have you been in the Guard long?"

"Not terribly, no. Less than a century."

Nessie walked on in silence, dumbstruck.

"What is your name, half-vampire?" he asked. "I told you mine."

"Oh, I'm sorry. It's Renesmee."

"What was that?"  
She sighed. "Rensemee. My name is Renesmee."

"You sound as mysterious as I am. I don't believe I've ever heard that name before."

"My mother made it up."

"Is that something Americans do? Your family is American, correct?"  
"Yes, they are. And no, it's just something my mother does."

"You have siblings, then? There are others like you?"

The question sent a jolt to Nessie's stomach as she remembered Aro's terrible words from the night before.

"No, there aren't any others," she said, swallowing. "Just me."

oOo

There were more vampires in the throne room than there had been the night before. Everyone was arranged more casually, as well, sitting on the steps of the dais or standing in groups, speaking rapidly in several different languages. The Brothers had not yet arrived.

Two vampires stood beside the heavy main doors, looking anxious and not speaking to each other or anyone else. Ze nudged her. "Your fellow recruits," he said. "Go take your place beside them."

She went to stand at the end of the row, next to a slight blonde woman whose eyes were almost entirely black. Ze wandered off to join a group of vampires in the middle of the room, and the wait began.

Neither Nessie nor the other two recruits moved at all in the forty-five minutes it took for the Brothers to appear. Everyone else was looking at them, and those who were speaking languages Nessie knew were talking mostly about her. She felt herself blushing and willed her cheeks to cool.

The general consensus seemed to be that she was the newest on Aro's list of pets. He'd always had a strange proclivity for the eccentric and useless, starting with the original Cullen. The silver-haired woman Nessie recognized from the night before was entertaining a group by speculating on how long the half-breed would last in a fight. Nessie paled as the conversation got more graphic. God. Did they not think she could speak German? Or maybe they just thought she had human-level hearing. Or maybe they didn't care.

She held her breath and watched the side door for the Brothers' arrival to end this whole episode. Eventually the door swung open and they appeared, all three of them. Marcus was, as usual, looking vacant. Caius was frowning and Aro was looking pleasantly about him as though he'd been invited to a party.

"Greetings, my dear ones," he said. In a flash every member of the guard was standing at attention against the walls, the stone floor empty as Aro stepped forward and raised his arms in welcome to them. "It is a joyful day for us, is it not?"  
"Yes, Master," they replied in unison, and sweat broke out on Nessie's forehead. She hated when they said that.

"Today we welcome three new members into our ranks, each eager, vivacious, and unusually talented. We are incredibly pleased they have volunteered to join us in our mission of keeping order and freedom in our world when the stakes, as I have told you all many times, are so very, very high.

"Now more than ever, as our numbers grow and a new era of lawlessness..." his eyes lingered for a moment on Nessie as he said this "...reigns in the minds of so many of our kind, our services are necessary to the harmony of our race. So it is with great pleasure that we welcome these three before us into our coven, to pledge their loyalty and service to our cause."

With that all three of the brothers moved to their seats, and the silver-haired woman who had said so many horrible things in German came forward and handed a rolled up sheet of paper to each of the recruits, Renesmee last.

The first vampire in line moved to the center of the room and knelt, unrolling his sheet. He spoke in English, with the faint hint of a British accent.

"I, Henry, hereby pledge my immortal allegiance to the brothers Volturi and their eternal family, and to them I dedicate my strength, my speed, and any gifts my immortality has granted me, in service to the preservation of our secrecy."

The man was tall, slender, and angelic, but his red eyes spoiled this effect. He spoke smugly, clearly impressed with himself and his good fortune at being chosen as a member of the most exclusive and powerful coven on the planet. For many, Nessie would come to realize, the shock at being "selected" and the humble feelings that accompanied it never lasted long for anyone—they quickly came to see their place in the Guard as their birthright.

The small blonde woman was next. Nessie realized that no one in this room except perhaps Aro himself had any idea how they had all come to be members of his coven. Eleazar had discovered Aro's method when the Volturi decided so precipitously to attack the Cullens, but all of these people here truly thought that their addition to the guard was a happy circumstance. Their allegiances were re-written from the moment the dust of battle cleared, the talented marked before a fight even started to be left alive, unharmed, manipulable. Suggestive to mercy.

As the blonde woman stood and brushed past Nessie to take her place again beside the door, Nessie realized it was her turn, and that all eyes in the room were on her with almost indecent levels of interest. She stepped forward, slowly unrolling the piece of paper in her hands, though by now the words she would say were burned into her brain. She watched her feet halt, her knee bend as though she were outside her body, and was startled by her own voice when it rang out in the crowded throne room, her mouth shaping words she still had trouble believing she was actually saying.

"I, Renesmee, hereby pledge my immortal allegiance...

_Please, tell me I will die someday._

to the brothers Volturi and their eternal family,"

_Oh, my family. Please forgive me, please forgive me._

"...and to them I dedicate my strength, my speed..."

_...to use for whatever horrible purpose you decide. _

"...and any gifts my immortality has granted me..."

_...the gift my parents granted me. They would never want it used this way._

"...in service to the preservation of our secrecy."

_...the nourishment of your insatiable hunger for power._

When Nessie closed her eyes she saw Alice's face, expressionless and sober like she had known all along that this would happen.

_Tell them why_, she begged the silent face in her mind. _Explain, please._

Afternoon bells pealed out merrily, dimly from the city square above as Aro placed his chilly hand briefly on the crown of her head, and it was over.


	14. Chapter 13

**A/N: **This story is updating with a delay I wouldn't have thought possible-I'm very sorry for keeping you waiting. My trip was much more intense than I had expected, and a comedy of errors led to malaria and then pneumonia, which threw me off my game a bit. The next chapter will come much sooner, as will my review replies.

A quick clarification, because many of you were wondering-At this point the Cullens have no idea where Nessie is; Alice last left her in France and is unable to see her future.

* * *

As a girl, Renesmee had a lot of terrible dreams. It was a common occurrence for her to startle awake in the dark with her heart pounding and the edges of a nightmare still lingering around the corners of her bed. Often her father heard her pulse change or saw her thoughts and came in, smoothed her hair, asked her what she'd been dreaming about. Or it would be her mother. Bella would raise Nessie by the shoulders and hold her, say nothing. Both methods were effective.

Sometimes, though, no one came, and it would be up to her to decide if she would call out for them or try to go back to sleep by herself. She chose this latter option one night when she was three and she'd had a nightmare about a black-haired man with a mean face who tore people's lips off. In the dream she would walk up to some member of her family and they would always have their backs to her, and when they turned around they would have no lips and horrible blank eyes, and she would scream and run away and then she was on the beach, and she was running and trying to catch Jacob because he was way out in front of her, and then he turned around and didn't have any lips either and she tried to scream but her throat was stuck and she woke up.

The dream left her with such icky, terrified feelings that she didn't want her parents to come in. She was half-afraid they wouldn't have any lips. She looked up at her paneled ceiling and blinked a few times, trying to think about something nice, like mossy waterfalls.

_Safe. I'm safe._

Her heart and her breathing slowed down a little bit; her grip on the comforter loosened. It was raining, plashing gently on her window, and the embers in her bedroom grate were still glowing. The nightmare began to recede across her floorboards, but that last image—that image of Jacob with his lips torn off—just wouldn't go away.

He was as strong as a vampire; he didn't get hurt. He was asleep right now on the Rez with his whole face attached—he would live forever just like she would.

The nightmare started creeping forward from her baseboards again as she thought about how all the other wolves had died. If he did live forever, he'd be the only one.

She sat bolt upright in bed. What if... what if... what if every minute that he spent in human form was a moment off of forever? What if in a few hundred years he started getting gray hair, like Charlie, and then in another thousand he just up and died? What if she was going to lose him?

Her hysteria ballooned unabated, and the next morning as soon as it was light outside she ran all the way to Uncle Billy's house and burst into Jacob's room while he was still fast asleep, crying and shaking his shoulders and telling him that he had to phase and stay that way, right this second. That night so many years ago had been the only time in all of Nessie's life that she had found reason to fear her immortality.

Until now.

She was sitting on a stone bench in the corner of Aro's walled interior garden, and the season was changing. She could feel it in the dipping temperature, the persistence of the rain. She'd been away from home for more than a year.

A whole year.

Just a year.

She wasn't sure which of these ways of looking at it startled her more.

It didn't help that time hardly seemed to exist in Volterra. The universe might have skidded backward into the Middle Ages for all she could tell, living here. If literature was to be believed, young women spent a lot of time in walled gardens in the Middle Ages. Allegories for Eden, where women fell over and over and over again.

But Nessie was done falling. She wasn't even seven years old and already she had decided to keep her nose clean forever.

Forever—she understood what that meant, now. Every day that passed from the moment Abdul and Fatima's lives had ended yielded more bitterness, more awareness of all the hundreds of thousands of people whisking by in currents of time, there and gone again too quickly for a second glance. On the days when she left the palace complex and wandered out into Volterra for food or guard duty, no human face held any significance, no matter how open or friendly. They were all dying tomorrow. Never, ever again would it be worth it.

"I thought I might find you here."

Nessie turned her head to see Ze framed in the curved archway that led into the dark recesses of the underground palace. She smiled at him.

"How did you guess?"

"We're about to have a meal. Are you sure you aren't interested in joining us just this once?"

Her smile disappeared. "No."

He sighed and clucked his tongue. "It's the sort of thing you ought to try once in your life, little one. No idea what you're missing otherwise. No way to make an informed decision..." he trailed off, raising his eyebrows.

"I've tried it," she said.

Ze's eyebrows retreated higher on his forehead. "I don't believe you," he said.

"Well, it's true."

"A Cullen, eating a human? They would have kicked you out."

Nessie glared at him. He laughed in surprise. "So that's what happened, is it?"

"No."

He shook his head, still laughing. "Well, I'm about to go dine on a truly fabulous passel of Australian tourists, or so I've been told. I really don't understand," he said, eyes narrowing, "how you can taste nectar like that once and ever resist it again."

"There are other things I can eat," she said impatiently. She stood and brushed the dirt off the back of her cloak. "I'm going out hunting, excuse me."

"Oh, do enjoy the mangy fawns on offer at this time in the season. I've been told they're delicious."

She swept past him with her chin in the air.

Ze was the only member of the guard who spoke to her outside of duty. Sometimes he reminded her a bit of her uncles, except a little more refined and a lot more dangerous.

They were all dangerous. Every one of them was so carefully controlled—it always seemed like they were plotting your demise behind their stoic, perfect faces.

She made her way with careful nonchalance down the cloister corridor that flanked the garden, and when she calculated she was far enough out of anyone's way, she ran. She ran as fast as she possibly could to the nearest elevator and mashed at the up button until it came down, and when she was let out into a carpeted alcove that served as a back entrance to the city walls she climbed right over them and took off again.

She never wanted to let them see how much it bothered her. It was a weakness she couldn't afford.

After the first few weeks of lying in her room with an ineffective pillow over her head to drown out the screaming, she had snapped and realized she couldn't be anywhere near the palace during feeding time, because in a few more months she would go completely insane.

Hearing it happen was one of the most terrible things she had ever experienced. She hadn't wanted to know how many people were dying and would never come back from vacation. She tried not to picture what was happening but she couldn't help it—the manic gleam in their blackened eyes as they latched on and drew deeply, their prey struggling feebly for a few moments. Blood on the walls—well, really, there probably wasn't any blood on the walls. Not a hair out of place.

The nausea would come rolling over her, just like it did whenever she found herself about to take someone's life, and sometimes she went and threw up in her shower. She hoped that they were all sufficiently occupied not to hear her.

Once, they called her to the throne room just moments after a feeding was over. She'd been terrified, wondering if they were doing this to her on purpose, if they wanted her to see.

But Aro was nothing if not unfailingly polite, and the room was pristine and gleaming just as it had always been. The only noticeable difference was the rich ruby color of everyone's eyes. She wondered what they had done with the bodies.

And she'd found out, too, just a week later. She returned from a hunting trip a little too early, and she made the mistake of going back to her room by way of the hallway that ran around the rear of the throne room. There were three of them—Santo, Gabriel, and Henry, standing beside a discrete black door with a giant pile of lifeless bodies tumbled around them. It was just a moment—in a flash they were all inside with the door closed, but Nessie felt a roar of heat. Every time she passed that door she shuddered a little, knowing an incinerator full of ashes must be on the other side.

By now she was smart enough to be miles away for the feedings and all events that surrounded them. She felt her muscles begin to relax as she flew over the hills outside the city. It was the only time she left Volterra, and only out here could she realize how hard and cold she was growing. Time looked endless, life gray. There was nothing to do in Volterra but sit. No one but Ze deigned to befriend her, not that she would have wanted them to, anyway. Notice could be deadly, and this place seemed worse than the court of Ancient Rome. Not even when she first ran away had she been so achingly lonely.

The only solace she found was in the beauty of the place around her. For the seat of all that was power-hungry and evil in the vampire world, the Volturi were great appreciators of beauty. Never had she seen such incredible art, so many, many books bound in rich leather and full of illuminated manuscripts. She didn't want to appreciate it, didn't want to concede even this minute quality—which to her seemed very human—to those she deemed more inhuman than anyone she had ever met, but it was difficult to resist when she felt so starved for goodness.

She was never going to forget what they had done to her friends. Every moment she was in their presence, Picassos on the walls or no, the word _murderers_ throbbed in her head like her pulse.

She knew she couldn't conceal her hatred of them from Aro, but he didn't seem to mind. He knew, as she did, that her commitment to the guard was absolute so long as it kept her family safe, whatever her private feelings about their actions.

Private feelings... she snorted and jumped a felled log. There was no such thing anymore. Nessie had been used to living with a mind-reader, but when she wasn't in her father's presence she had freedom to think on whatever she wanted and he would never know about it. Aro's gift, however he might lust after Edward's, was so much more powerful. Whatever she thought in her bed as she fell asleep he knew the next morning when she took his hand. No one else seemed bothered, laying their minds bare every day for their Master. Perhaps she would grow not to care anymore, either.

The drizzle was growing more insistent as she ran farther afield, a warning that soon it would be raining outright. She didn't mind. When she couldn't sit in the garden she could sit in the library, the only other place where she felt a little bit of peace. It was enormous and ancient, and perhaps the best mark in its favor was that it reminded her of _Beauty and the Beast._ Her whole family had come to despise _Beauty and the Beast_ because she watched it over and over for a good six months, and sang songs from it at the top of her lungs, flinging her arms wide at the top of the banister in the big house.

_ I want adventure in the great wide somewhere! I want it more than I can teeeeeeeeell..._

She had sometimes made Jacob phase and play the Beast.

Her grandfather's presence seemed to lie heavy in the library, as well—she knew without him ever telling her so that he had spent a great deal of time there, poring over rustling leaves of paper in the dress of hundreds of years ago. The ghost of his presence comforted her as she snuggled down into her leather armchair on rainy days like this one.

Between the garden and the library and the chance to run miles away when the rest of the guard was killing people, her life in Volterra had so far been bearable, now that she was finished with the battery of tests Aro had ordered performed on her. For an hour or so each day in the weeks after she first arrived she had been subjected to all sorts of procedures... DNA samples, mental aptitude exams, measurements, tests on how high she could jump and how fast she could run, hearing drills where a pair of headphones got softer and softer until she couldn't hear anything anymore. Whoever was administering this test or that one would practically radiate smugness when the limits of her abilities were reached.

She was used to being a subject—it had happened constantly at home, with her grandfather academically curious and her father unendingly anxious. She had found such things an annoyance then, but she had a new appreciation for their care in handling her, the love that ran like a current beneath every poke, prod, and scribble on a data sheet. This was cold, calculating, and invasive by comparison.

An examination of her gift was carried out before the Brothers themselves, as it was the piece of her Aro was most interested in. She was asked to touch multiple guard members and project different things—images, phrases from a book, emotions. They were, as usual, trying to find her limits, but here it never worked. It seemed that Nessie's ability to project with touch extended to any language the mind could speak, and Aro grew more and more fascinated.

"There's one other thing I'd like to try, if you don't mind, my dear," he said. "I picked up something quite curious in your father's...oh, forgive me, of course I shouldn't have mentioned..."

Nessie looked at the floor.

"Anyway, I at some point came across an indication that perhaps you had a second gift, or a corollary, if you will." Nessie met his eyes in shock.

"It was suggested, you see, that perhaps you possessed the secondary ability of shield breaking... that anyone who attempted to shield themselves against your gift by any gift that they might possess would be unable to do so."

Nessie stared at him. Her parents had never told her this, though she suddenly realized that she had always been able to communicate with her mother, back before Bella had learned to open her mind... Nessie's heart started to pound. Everyone in the room, of course, heard it. Someone hissed.

"I was hoping that we might be able to test this little theory, because it would be quite wonderful if it were true, would it not?"

Nessie nodded.

"It is quite fortunate that we happen to possess such a range of talent in our ranks. Renata, my dear..."

Aro's personal guard stepped out from behind his chair, her excitement at a new opportunity to prove her devotion obvious on her face. Nessie had always found Renata's obsession with Aro a little bit disturbing.

"We'll need someone for you to shield, of course, for Renesmee to attempt to communicate with..." His eyes passed over the guard members assembled, but it was clearly just for show. He already knew whom he would ask.

"Jane!" he said with apparent surprise as his eyes fell over her. "Who better?"

"Of course, master," came her high, sweetly quiet voice. She stepped forward to stand next to Renata, smiling creepily at Nessie.

"Now, Renata, we all know the impressive extent of your powers. Shield Jane here to the best of your ability, and Renesmee, you put your hand on Jane's arm and see if you can show her something."

Nessie's first reaction was to cringe at the thought that she actually had to touch the terrible little witch, but it occurred to her as she stared at Jane's open hand that Aro had given no specifications as to what she was supposed to project. She returned Jane's smile and stepped forward so that they were almost toe to mary-jane-clad toe, and laid her hand lightly on the girl's wrist, suppressing a shudder as she did so. Renata's hand was clenched on Jane's opposite shoulder, her lips compressed in concentration.

Nessie took a moment to gather all the right thoughts, and then, looking Jane right in the eyes, she slammed her with the most heinous, graphic sight she could imagine. Jane, her soft voice screaming in agony, flames searing at her rock-hard flesh, skin bubbling, curling back, turning to ash and exposing the muscle and bone beneath, venom flowing freely like blood as the ear-piercing shriek continued. She held Jane's gaze as the girl's eyes flashed in anger and her chin began to tremble slightly—Nessie was close enough to see it. Jane's lips pulled back from her teeth and she snarled softly. Nessie focused her thoughts a little more pointedly on the bubbling flesh and the screaming...

"Jane?" Aro asked, cutting into Nessie's concentration. She lifted her hand from Jane's wrist but didn't break her gaze, daring Jane to tell on her. Jane's teeth were still pulled back.

"It worked, Master," she said. "I was able to see the thoughts she projected."

Aro clapped his hands. "Wonderful!" he said. Renata was looking crestfallen.

Nessie smiled brightly at Jane, who looked like she wanted to set Nessie writhing on the floor. She couldn't, though, not without a direct order.

"Well," said Aro, "I think that's more than enough for today. I am quite pleased to discover what a little gem we've stumbled across, here. I will have to think, for a while, to what use we can best put these extraordinary gifts."

Now, weeks later, she had yet to be sent on an assignment. Even Aro probably had to acknowledge that she was essentially useless, a show piece for his collection. Her gift might be flashy, but it wasn't worth very much in practice. She was beginning to think she would live out the rest of eternity in Volterra, which, though terribly depressing, was far better than being put to Aro's uses.

She found a rabbit, sank her teeth in. Its blood was viscous and unsatisfying.

oOo

Not quite two weeks later she was summoned into the Brothers' presence and given an assignment. A few members of the guard were being sent to check in with some human contacts in Bulgaria, some sort of business operation that needed to be smoothed out. She would be accompanying them as an extra set of senses for the journey, in case they encountered any trouble. This made no sense, but she complied.

She was sent with Felix and Chelsea, a pairing she was sure was designed to punish her. She had done her absolute best to avoid Felix in the months she had spent in Volterra—it wasn't too difficult, as he was often abroad on assignments of one kind or another. She had only spent moments at a time in his company, and even then they were in the throne room in the presence of dozens of other vampires. As the three of them met in the square precisely at 11:00 pm Nessie breathed heavily through her nose, trying to control her fury.

It was so unfair, how weak she was. He had murdered her friends and left them for her to find, and there was nothing she could do to him. If she tried to touch him, lay one finger on his hulking form, she'd be dead in seconds. There was absolutely no way to avenge them. He could stand there and smile at her and all her ineffective anger and she would do as she was told and _help_ him. She made a herculean effort to get her feelings under control.

Chelsea spoke first. "Shall we?" Her disdain for Nessie was obvious, but none of them would ever dream to challenge an order, so the useless child came along, if Aro willed it. "We'll have to travel much more slowly than usual," she said. "Just follow our lead. You've never even been further east than here, have you, child?"

"No," said Nessie, gritting her teeth.

"Stick close to us, then. We'll try to move slowly enough for you. You aren't going to need to go hunting animals while we're off on duty, are you?"

"No, thank you." She was afraid one of her teeth was going to crack. "I'll be fine for the next several days, just like you."

The corner of Chelsea's lip rose slightly. "Glad to hear it," she said. "Felix?"

"Oh, I'm ready. This is going to be very enjoyable." He smiled at Nessie and turned away from the fountain in a swirl of black.

They set out at human pace to a private garage down by the edge of the city, Nessie trailing a bit behind the other two out of sheer distaste. A human guard in a blue uniform nodded at Felix from his glass booth and pressed a button for the automatic door. It lifted almost silently to reveal row after row of some of the most incredible cars Nessie had ever seen. A mechanical chirp echoed through the dark space and a black BMW on the left flashed its headlights. Felix and Chelsea were in the car with the doors shut before Nessie had lifted her foot for her next step. Cute.

She flew to the car and landed in the backseat as quickly as she was able, before Felix had finished laughing at her. Chelsea's head whipped around in surprise as the door slammed behind Nessie—they must have thought she was as slow as a human. Without a word, Felix flipped the key in the ignition and pulled out of the garage. Nessie looked behind her to see the human guard waving at them from his booth.

None of them said much as they left the city and headed out onto the SS68, and Nessie didn't speak at all. She didn't trust herself to stay out of trouble. She looked out at the dark, shifting landscape instead, all the way into Slovenia, but somehow without meaning to she fell asleep with her cheek stuck to the window after they'd crossed the border. She woke to the undercurrent of Chelsea's melodic Italian, telling Felix something about newborns. She shifted in her seat and Felix looked up into the mirror.

"Did you sleep well, princess?" he asked in English. Nessie narrowed her eyes at him.

"I speak Italian, you know. Where are we?"

"Serbia, for a little while longer," said Chelsea.

Nessie craned her neck and looked out the window at a pale blue range of mountains in the distant North. "Is that where we're going?" she asked, pointing.

Felix laughed. "No. That's a different country princess—Romania. We don't do much there."

Nessie's cheeks burned, despite her best efforts not to let them shame her. "Why not? What's wrong with Romania?"

"Nothing. I think we should waltz in once a year just to show the shriveled old fools we can, but the Brothers like to keep the peace, so we're gracious and we give them their space."

Nessie rolled her eyes in the back seat. Gracious, indeed. Felix's teeth were visible in the rear view mirror, the teeth that had punctured Fatima's neck. She clenched her fists on her seat and looked out at the mountains, remembering Vladimir and Stefan and their near-translucent skin, their physical and mental decay from all those years of never moving, of simply waiting to be worshiped. She shivered.

It wasn't long after that they crossed into Bulgaria, and though Nessie had no desire to be there she had to admit that it was absolutely beautiful. Her nose stayed glued to the window through the ride deeper and deeper into what she knew for American humans was still almost a forbidden land, even though they could now go there whenever they pleased. Carlisle had explained to her that for several decades this whole part of the world they'd been driving through had seemed as inaccessible and mysterious to American humans as had the moon. It was a unique ability her grandfather possessed, understanding what things were like for humans. Much of school for her consisted of his impressions of human experience, because all the compassionate actions in the world meant nothing if one couldn't look at a human and understand that something was confusing or frightening or painful for them, and so it was imperative that she understand how Americans felt when they thought about the Iron Curtain and the lands behind it, even if a vampire could come and go without a care in the world.

Which was exactly what they were doing right now. She turned her eyes away from the window and looked at Chelsea and Felix, who seemed rather bored. The Volturi didn't know or care about the nuances of human feeling, because they saw no value in humanity—all they saw was weakness.

And she almost, almost understood it. Now that she had tried... now that she had held her closest friends' dead bodies in her arms and tasted for the first time the true bitterness of immortality, she could understand how desperately vampires might need to see only the weakness and never the value, because being denied those gifts was, without a doubt, the worst and most crippling thing imaginable.

She remembered all the Tolkien she had read with her mother before bed—The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, and how it had felt to hear her mother read the passages where the elves first stumbled on the men and saw the "strange gift" that was their deaths. Her mother's voice hadn't wavered one bit, but even then Nessie had wondered, as she lay there with her hands folded under her chin, if other members of her family might have spoken those words very, very differently, and she was glad she was reading with her mother.

Neither Chelsea nor Felix could afford to admit that death was a gift, and a gift they would never, ever taste, so they dealt it out every chance they got, desperate to prove they weren't missing anything…

The countryside seemed endless. Nessie didn't know how far they'd have to go to meet their contacts or what they'd even be doing once they got there.

_Please don't kill anyone; please don't make me watch you kill anyone._

They drove on in silence through late afternoon, when they pulled off the highway and onto a road full of potholes. The car bounced violently as Felix navigated the narrow lanes and Nessie began to worry about the BMW's suspension, but the road eventually ended in a dirt track leading to a large, imposing stone house. Felix and Chelsea shot out of the car at the same moment, the doors closing behind them as they mounted the steps and Felix unlocked the door. Nessie slid across the back seat and stepped out, stretching her back and eying the house warily. She didn't hear any voices or heartbeats coming from inside.

She mounted the wooden steps and pushed open the door they'd left ajar. The foyer was dark, with a low-hung chandelier and faded red tapestries covering the walls. The first doorway Nessie peered into led into a lavish but dusty living room with a fireplace taking up half the wall and a large assortment of brocade furniture. Chelsea was lounging on a long golden couch, coiling one jet-black curl around her finger. Felix was nowhere to be seen.

"Where are we?" asked Nessie.

"This is a house we like to use whenever we stay here. We'll wait here for evening and then we'll go meet our employees."

Right, it wouldn't do to sparkle, or wear long black cloaks that drew a lot of attention and probably weren't as intimidating as they were meant to be. Nessie flopped down onto a chaise and watched a cloud of dust float up in response.

"If you need to sleep some more, there are bedrooms upstairs. Felix is already taking a shower."

Nessie nodded and got up again, glad for any excuse to be alone on this terrible journey. She walked back out into the foyer and down a hallway until she found a set of carpeted stairs that creaked as she mounted them. The light bulbs set into the ceiling were naked, the light they cast severe. There were paintings hanging on every inch of the walls, it seemed—but none of them were of people. They were all landscapes or fruit or leaves on pavement or splashes of color. The sound of running water was coming from the East end of the house, so Nessie turned the other way and opened doors until she found a bed—it had a blue cover and a faded brocade canopy with heavy curtains. The window looked out over the BMW in the drive and the dirt track that led back to the pot-holed road beyond. She lay down on top of the covers and slept away the rest of the afternoon.

oOo

She awoke sometime around the end of sunset, when the edges of the sky were still a bit pink but the stars were showing, to the sound of a revving engine. She rubbed frantically at her eyes and pried open the rusty hinges of the window. The car was purring below, both Felix and Chelsea already inside. She jumped.

She pulled open the back door and dropped gracelessly in, slamming it behind her with enough force to warp the frame just a little bit as they peeled out.

"Oh, don't throw a temper tantrum," said Chelsea. "We weren't going to leave without you."

_No, just humiliate me. Again._

Nessie turned her head to the trees rushing past her window and pressed her lips together. It wasn't worth saying anything, and she was already feeling a little better, like Felix and Chelsea were actually treating her pretty well, all things considered, and they were a team this weekend...

She shook her head and tried to step out of the fog of Chelsea's gift. She was afraid of what she might be enticed into doing if she gave in to it.

The trip was only about fifteen minutes long, when Felix was the one at the wheel. He drove even faster than Nessie's father had. They slowed down and pulled to a stop in an industrial complex on the opposite side of town from the stone house. Once again Chelsea and Felix stepped out in unison and slammed their doors, and Nessie was still scooting out and righting her dress as they strode up to a security door and pushed a button. A tinny voice rang out in the evening silence, speaking in a language Nessie couldn't understand.

"No, I don't think you're closed," said Felix in French, a slight purr in his voice.

There was a strangled noise from the other end of the device, and the door swung open of its own accord. Nessie ran to catch up before it closed in front of her. The hallway they were standing in was narrow and oppressively white, and Nessie followed Felix and Chelsea to the end of the corridor where a short man with grizzled gray hair stood behind a metal grill set into yet another door. Nessie couldn't help a small gasp as she realized she was looking at a man she'd seen before—he'd been driving the truck she'd followed into the mechanics' warehouse that night in St. Denis. He made eye contact with her briefly, and Nessie saw that he was sweating, his pupils dilated.

That's why she was here. Aro was punishing her.

"We...we not expect you," he said in broken French.

"No, I imagine you didn't," said Chelsea. "Open the door; we have a few things to discuss with you."

The man obeyed, though Nessie saw his hand was shaking as he reached for the lock.

"Is problem? I... I not yet met lady," he said, attempting to smile.

"No," Chelsea said. "You haven't; I'm just another associate."

"Of course. Please, this way. Everyone is here this evening."

They continued down the hallway and passed three or four closed doors before the gray man rapped his knuckles three times on one of them, then turned the knob and ushered them in.

The lights in this room were dimmer, coming from floor lamps set in the corners. There were seven men arranged in plastic chairs around a long, low table in the center of the room. All of them stood on the Volturi's entrance. Several chairs fell over.

Another man Nessie recognized, the one with the sunglasses, the translator from St Denis, stepped forward. "Sir, it's such an unexpected pleasure to see you this evening." He was clearly more confident than the others, or better at hiding his fear. His voice didn't waver and his face showed no signs of the disquiet that colored every other countenance in the room—three vampires in their office at one time clearly had these men terrified.

"We just came for a quick word," said Felix. "Do you mind if we sit down?"

Chairs materialized, and Nessie followed Chelsea's silent lead, sitting down and crossing her left leg over her right, hands folded over her knees. Felix's massive frame barely fit into his chair—he looked almost comical, scrunched into it, but no one was laughing. Sunglasses took his seat again and rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt.

"What can we do for you?"

"We wanted you to be aware that the problems on our end have been dealt with."

"Have they?" asked Sunglasses. "What was causing the, ah, problems?"

"One of our kind, as several of you might have guessed."

Nessie shifted in her seat.

"And this one has been, as you said, dealt with? That's wonderful news."

"Yes..." said Felix, tracing a pattern on the table in front of him with one massive finger. "So I'd like your assurance that there will be no more problems on _your_ end, no more withholding of merchandise or threats to our people."

Sunglasses was beginning to look uncomfortable. "That was regrettable," he said. "We have our own business interests to protect, of course, and with your end unable to deliver as promised, it was necessary for us to take certain measures..."

Felix's growl was so low they probably almost didn't hear it, but Sunglasses stopped talking at once. Tension fell thick and heavy, all the men around the table glancing at each other out of the corners of their eyes. An old desktop computer at the side of the room beeped loudly and started flashing a screen saver. Nessie glanced at Chelsea, who was staring at Sunglasses with a small, enigmatic smile on her lips. Nessie wondered what she was doing to him.

"You have my word there will be no more problems," said Sunglasses, recovering his confidence. The man on his right started muttering again in that language Nessie didn't know, but Sunglasses grabbed the man's arm and he fell silent immediately.

"Is there anything else I can help you with, Sir?" he said, his smile painfully broad.

"I think we're done here," said Felix, grinning right back, and without warning he and Chelsea were out the door and down the hall in an impressive display of supernatural power that left Nessie standing alone with a room full of racing hearts and dropped jaws.

Alone…alone with every last person really responsible for the carjacking and the shooting and the weapons and every single person who was dead…

Her throat itched insistently, her fingers twitched. Her lips drew back minutely from her teeth. The men were all looking at her now, instead of the swinging door the vampires had left in their wake. It would be so easy...

She hissed, and the man closest to her took a step back. She felt the familiar cramping of her muscles, the rising bile in her throat. Anger and power were rushing through her veins, making her deaf to everything but their miserable heartbeats…

With a frustrated scream her fist hit the table and it splintered down the middle, teetering and collapsing in a heap on the floor. No one moved. She kicked her chair to the floor and was out the door before they blinked. Felix pulled smoothly away from the complex while Nessie sat curled in the back seat, biting into her own arm.


	15. Chapter 14

Catch-up: Nessie has been sent to Bulgaria with Felix and Chelsea, to meet with the arms dealers for St. Denis. She has narrowly avoided killing them.

* * *

The trip home was largely uneventful—they didn't stop at the stone house again. They drove straight through for a day and a half, and nobody talked. Nessie sat with her legs curled beneath her body, immune to the wintering scenery that flashed by her tinted window. Her right forearm stung—she had mopped up the blood with her cloak but was privately (and perhaps childishly) hoping her open wound would make Chelsea and Felix uncomfortable. If it was working, she couldn't tell. She ran one finger up and down the seam in the dark leather seats, attempting to restrict her fidgeting to this one barely noticeable movement. She just wanted the ride to be over—she was restless, choking on hatred, and Chelsea did not seem to be making any attempt to soften her. Nessie wondered what the threads of relationship looked like between the three of them right now to Chelsea's gifted eye. Like a black hole, probably. A singularity in the back seat.

They reached Volterra in the early hours of the morning, while most of its human population was still quiet. The reedy parking attendant was at his post, blinking sluggishly, and Felix tossed him the car keys as they all re-fastened their cloaks and exited the garage. Nessie didn't wait for instructions—she whirled to the left in a flurry of wool and dodged down narrow, shadowy alleyways until she reached a sewer drain that would take her to her bedroom. She nudged the grate aside, jumped, and navigated the dank tunnels beneath the city with a dexterity that disgusted her—she couldn't believe she had already come to know this place so well. When she reached her room she closed and locked the door, though she knew as the bolt slid home that she was only performing a formality.

They gave her the grace of a few hours' sleep before she was summoned the next morning. Felix and Chelsea had gone directly to report and Nessie's absence had been noted, but allowed due to her pitiable need for sleeping. The moment she mounted Aro's steps and gave him her hand he saw everything, of course, but he didn't say a word about her threadbare self-control. Perhaps he had come closer to breaking her than he'd anticipated.

Whatever the case, the next few days were a return to her usual routine. She stood duty on the walls when it was her turn. She paged through a couple of volumes in the library. On Wednesday morning, which dawned crisp and sunny, she went outside just because she could—unlike the rest of them, her glow was barely noticeable. She had hoped it would lift her brooding lassitude but she wandered in and out of shops and mixed with crowds of people like a ghost, untouched and untouchable.

All the other members of the guard came and went regularly. Apart from Renesmee, only Renata spent all of her time in the palace, at Aro's side. The wives presumably stayed as well, but Renesmee had never seen them. Even at the largest gathering in which she'd taken part, her own swearing-in, they hadn't made an appearance. She remembered them from her childhood but even then they had been shrouded in veils so thick that their only definable characteristic was their height.

On Thursday, Ze came back from somewhere (he never told her where he went and she liked it that way) and they went for a walk in the garden.

"So, are you happy to see me?" he asked.

She thought about how to answer. He sought her out whenever he was in the palace, asked her questions, teased her in a way that was almost comfortable. She had grown less guarded, less repulsed by his bright red eyes and shocking way of talking the longer she knew him. It was possible that he was becoming her only friend.

"Yes," she said.

He laughed. "If it takes that long to say so, I must doubt you."

"You shouldn't take it personally. Not much can make me happy these days."

"Oh, that can't be true. A squirrel, for instance—a nice, juicy squirrel all fattened up for hibernation, Renesmee. Think of that. Aren't you happy just thinking about that?"

"That's disgusting."

"Says the animal eater."

"You don't know anything about eating animals," she said, and had just launched herself into an impassioned diatribe on the taste differentials in the blood of herbivores and carnivores when he reached out, quick as a flash, and traced his hand down the side of her cheek.

"It's fascinating to see you blush."

She froze.

"To think," he said, his gaze falling to her wrist and fingers, then up to her neck, "there is blood running through your body just like the blood of a human. It's so interesting... it smells fragrant and pleasant, but not appealing to my thirst... as though I know you are not to be eaten..."

She was staring at him with her mouth slightly open.

"You were saying...about herbivores?" He dropped his hand as though nothing strange had happened.

She blinked several times. "They don't taste as good," she said.

"But they are, perhaps, easier to 'hunt'?"

"There's no difference. We're fast enough that it doesn't matter."

"I think I'd like to see you hunt animals sometime."

She rolled her eyes and turned to walk the other way.

"Wait," he said, laying a hand on her arm, "I'm serious."

"What could there possibly be for you to see?"

"It would be a novelty," he said simply. "Besides, there always seems to be more to learn. You are perpetually mysterious, half-vampire."

oOo

Ze probably never thought about this small exchange again, but it kept Nessie up for more than half of Thursday night. Him touching her like that, looking at her like that… it made her think of Jacob.

She'd felt a small, internal shudder, a panicked confusion. But it was so pale and inchoate compared to her swirling memories of Jacob that she understood with a new level of conviction that she would never again want someone to touch her. She was never going to be in love. She had nothing in her for anyone but him, and she was never going to see him again. She didn't deserve to.

She pressed a finger to her lowest rib, thinking of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester and their little golden thread. Was Jacob on the other end of this? She usually tried so hard not think about him, about any of them, but tonight she couldn't help it.

Her fingers spread open to reach out into the empty air. He had to be on the other end. He had imprinted on her.

She had been such a foolish child, not to notice. What grown man spends that much of his time with a little girl? She should have known, but he had just always been there. He was her best friend, her big brother. It had been so easy, loving him. And now she would never know a thing about love outside the books in Aro's library.

She could only hope, as she pressed her face into the coolness of her pillow and stopped breathing for a moment, that the same wouldn't be true for him. If she had doomed him to a forever without any kind of love, she would never be able to forgive herself.

Would it be forever, though? Without her to stay alive for, would he stop phasing, let himself grow old...die? The thought twisted a knife in her gut, but she had already lost him, all his laughter, his careful friendship, never pushing teasing too far the way her uncles did, arms always open. It had been more than a year since she'd lost all hope of hearing the beat of his heart or pressing her fingers into his fur. Why would him dying make any difference?

She hoped he would get to die. It was the best thing she could think of to want for him.

oOo

The next day she didn't leave her room until the afternoon, and she only went as far as the garden. The air was chilly and the foliage long dead, but she drew her cloak closer around her body and sat down on the bench. A brisk wind set the empty, spindly branches of the trees dancing and creaking and tugged at the loose strands of her hair. She glanced up at the low, gray sky and let her thoughts wander up and down the small confines of her chosen life. She could almost feel herself getting smaller as the weeks went by. A few years more and she would be a younger copy of Marcus.

As though proving her own prophecy she stayed in the garden for several hours, only realizing when she heard the bells chiming from the clock tower that it had grown dark, and that she had been expected to make an appearance before the brothers for another hand-holding session. Since Bulgaria, Aro had requested her presence more often, probably so that he could mine her thoughts for sedition. She jumped up from the bench and raced through the twisting, turning corridors to the throne room, where several members of the guard were assembled, looking bored. Gianna was there, with a laptop, the clacking of her nails on the keys filling the otherwise silent room.

"Renesmee, there you are," said Aro. "Come here, my child."

She climbed the two steps to Aro's chair with her hand out, palm-up. She was not allowed, after that first night when she touched his shoulder, to share her thoughts. He insisted that he take them from her as he took them from everyone. Perhaps he secretly feared a power imbalance.

He grabbed her fingers just as this thought passed her mind and she winced, but he sighed a little as she felt the rush of sense pass her fingers and he didn't seem bothered. It was business as usual. She looked to her left at Marcus and his empty face, at Caius, who had one corner of his lip lifted in distaste. He had never liked her, and she took this as a compliment. He had never liked anyone in her family.

Her eyes strayed to the barely discernible ceiling, which reminded her for a moment of the mosque she had gone into with Fatima just once. In St. Denis wires hung from the very heights of the building fell all the way down to support the low-lying circles of lights that men prayed by. Here, however, it was not an iron-wrought set of bulbs but an intricate crystal chandelier, pristine and perfect like everything else in the throne room, and no one was praying. She looked down again and was startled to see that Aro's eyes were no longer closed, and she had just accidentally made eye contact with him. Her eyes darted to the floor as he loosened his grip on her hand.

There was the rush of wind that accompanies vampire movement. A door slammed. Aro straightened and gave an excited, ominous hiss, sounding almost hungry. Nessie panicked, wondering if she had forgotten an unscheduled dinnertime and was finally about to witness what she had tried so hard not to see. Before she had a chance to bolt, Aro spoke.

"Welcome, once again, to Volterra."

Nessie turned around to see almost the very last thing she would have expected.

It was Alice, standing in the middle of the room with two members of the guard flanking her either side. She had on a black turtleneck sweater and a pair of jeans, with red ballet slippers on her feet. She wasn't looking at Nessie, but at Aro. All the air seemed to have left the room, and the guard was suddenly standing at full attention.

Nessie felt her heart constricting in her chest. Why was this happening? Alice couldn't be here. It would ruin everything. What, what had she done wrong?

Aro's voice broke the tense silence. "Alice, it is a great pleasure, in fact, I cannot even tell you how great a pleasure... to see you here. I trust that you, with all of your exceptional abilities and wisdom, saw that this was the best way?"

Alice gave a sharp nod, but said nothing.

No. Nessie had done everything she was supposed to do. She renounced her whole family. She joined the enemy. She did everything Aro asked, and they would stay safe. He was going to leave them alone. She ended this. She protected them.

No. This whole time…

She was a pawn. She'd made this possible. Oh god, god, god.

"I am so very glad," continued Aro, seemingly oblivious to Nessie's inner turmoil. "You are most welcome, and Gianna here will do the best she can to make you comfortable. You will be staying, I assume?"

Alice gave another jerk of her head. Aro's answering smile was terrifying. "Excellent. Your talents are sorely needed in our mission to keep order."

"I have one thing to say, Aro," said Alice, her clear voice ringing out through the room for the first time.

"By all means..." said Aro, opening his palms.

She paused for a moment, studying him. "Prophets do not win you wars. They never have. You take me into your service at your own peril. It's only fair for me to warn you that I am fallible. The world is outside of my control, and knowing more about it than I should simply makes me dangerous to you."

Aro chuckled. "You are a Cullen, aren't you? I see it in all of you—that curious passion to be human, to drown yourself in human concerns and human history. It is the mark of your sire, I suppose."

"Carlisle was not my sire," said Alice.

"Oh, of course he was," said Aro, waving away her words with his right hand. "In all ways that matter, at least. Now, it was very noble of you to impart such a grave warning, and I will of course take it under advisement and use the utmost caution when employing your admirable abilities to the work that is our burden. But come, my dear, Volterra is a beautiful place, your own little niece is here to keep you company, and you will enjoy the highest place of honor here, now that you have chosen to join us. No vampire could conceive of a better life than the one you are just beginning to enjoy."

For the first time, Alice looked at Nessie, and her dark brows drew down in concern. Nessie fought to stand her ground.

"Do you know," said Aro, looking between Alice and Nessie, "Gianna is obviously taken up with her dictation. Renesmee, will you please make sure your aunt is comfortably settled? She may have the purple room, in the tower. You know where to find everything, yes?"

Nessie nodded mutely. The tower rooms were rarely given to guard members, and never, ever to new ones. Nessie thought she heard Jane hiss.

"Wonderful," said Aro. "Go catch up, then. I'm sure you have much to talk about."

Nessie stepped carefully down from Aro's chair and walked up to her aunt, never taking her eyes from Alice's face. She reached out and took Alice's hand, which was perfectly steady and cool, though her own was trembling madly.

"This...ah, this way." She led Alice through the side door and down a hallway to the base of the tower, where she pushed the elevator button, moving on autopilot. Alice stood silent beside her.

Neither of them said anything as the elevator rose, as they stopped on the fifth floor, as Nessie opened the Purple Room, usually left vacant for important guests the brothers wanted to flatter. Only when the door was shut behind them and they stood alone in the circular room with lavender walls and windows facing almost every direction did they look at each other.

"How...what...why are you..? Nessie stuttered.

Alice threw her arms around Nessie and crushed her almost painfully to her chest.

"You're all right," she muttered into Nessie's shoulder. "You're all right. I was so afraid because I couldn't see this part and I didn't know what had happened to you and I thought that... oh, but you're all right. You're really all right."

"Yes, yes, Alice, I'm fine. I'm okay. What are you doing here?" She pulled back, holding her frantic aunt at arm's length.

Alice sighed. "I had to come. I can't explain it, but every other choice would have ended so much worse. I can't see very far... I can't really see anything anymore now that I'm with you, but this was the only way and even though I don't know what to do from here I had to come. He wasn't going to give up. He was going to get me, so I had to choose how."

Nessie started pacing. She couldn't help hearing her grandmother's voice, more emphatic and full of furious love than she had ever heard it...

_Don't ever do that to me again._

And she had. Because of Nessie.

"Alice, I'm...I'm so, so sorry. This was my fault, wasn't it? I had no idea... I thought I was keeping him away from all of you..."

"Ssh, Nessie," said Alice, leading them to the overstuffed chaise against the wall. They sat down and Alice smoothed Nessie's hair back from her forehead.

"This isn't your fault," said Alice. "I promise. It's... he wanted me. He's always wanted me, ever since that day Edward tried to destroy himself, when Bella and I went to save him. That was the day Aro discovered the...particularities... of what I can do, and it was only a matter of time. You were the excuse, not the reason. Don't you understand? Both times! Both times he used you as the excuse to attack our family so that he could take me. I'm the real reason the Volturi have been after us for years, not you."

Nessie shook her head. "I gave them the reasons, Alice. I gave them the excuses. Every time. Without me they never would have stood a chance of attacking our family. And it's not just you...he wanted my dad too, didn't he?"

"Yes, but much, much less than he wanted me."

It was terrible. Being in Alice's presence, holding her hands and looking into her eyes... it was all so much more than Nessie thought she would ever experience again for the rest of eternity. She had tried so hard not to think about any of them, and now here Alice was, like all the dreams she didn't dare indulge coming to life before her eyes.

But it was so, so terrible. They were both bound here now. Their family... their family was broken.

"Alice, Jasper..."

Alice stood up and turned away. "He's safe."

"You left them all behind!"

"I had to. You should understand that."

"I don't! I don't understand it! I did this so none of you would have to, don't you get it? And now look, here you are, about to swear yourself into the Volturi guard just like I did because nothing I did made any difference!"

"I told you already, you weren't the one he wanted. Having you was never going to be enough."

"How do you know? How? You don't know that they're safe. You don't know that this is the end. You can't see anything anymore!" She was yelling now. "Alice, why did you do this? You have to get away. In just a few hours it's going to be too late, and you'll be in this tower until it crumbles at the end of the world, god damn it!"

"Stop," said Alice, whirling around so quickly it made Nessie dizzy. "You don't know what you're talking about. I _do_ see. I told you I don't see my own future anymore, and that's true. But I see them. I see them, and Nessie, you have to trust me. This is the end. They _will be safe_. I promise."

"I'm sorry," said Nessie, her voice thick. "But...how could you possibly know if living without you is worth it to them?"

"Funny you should say that," said Alice. "You didn't seem to hesitate for a moment, when you decided we could live without you."

Nessie felt the tears coming. "That isn't fair."

"It's the same thing, and you know it." She flopped back down onto the chaise, looking at Nessie with one eyebrow raised. "Now, are we going to continue crying and yelling at each other or can you just be glad I'm here?"

Nessie shook her head. "I...I don't get it, Alice. Can you really do this? Can you really work for them? I went on _one_ assignment, just one, and I almost snapped. They haven't sent me out since."

"I know... I know what side we're on now, and I don't like it either, but... I know this is the right thing. And we will _not_ be here until the end of the world, Ness."

Nessie's eyes widened. She felt a ridiculous urge to lean forward a little and start whispering, as though they could keep secrets that way.

"I'm going to be glued to Aro from this moment on, and my mind isn't going to be my own. I'll just say this, and then never again, all right?"

Nessie nodded slowly, leaning minutely closer.

"I can't see you. Remember that."

And that was it. It was the only thing that mattered but not another word could be said, not another look dwelt on long enough for these things to take root in their minds. Nessie wanted to jump out of her own skin at the impossible thought that there might be a way out, but she schooled her features and sat back against the pillows. They spent the rest of that evening together, talking about Volterra and its garden and library, and Ze, and the tests they'd made Nessie take and the vision she had forced on Jane...Alice laughed out loud.

"Oh, that is just too perfect, Ness. I wish I could have been there to see it."

"She got so angry... she was baring her teeth and growling, but nobody was about to stop me and she wasn't going to be a wuss and tell on me or anything... Oh, it felt so good, Alice, I can't even tell you."

Alice nodded. Nessie shifted on the chaise. Neither of them could give words to the thoughts ruling their minds, the aching sadness and the fear and the family they might never see again. Whenever the conversation petered out Nessie could feel all the unspoken things pressing in on them, and she would start talking again about something that was almost funny or almost interesting, just to press back all of the terrible, silent possibilities that hung close around them like the walls. Alice seemed more than willing to play along, listening patiently and making encouraging noises at the appropriate moments. Eventually Nessie grew so tired that her head was falling forward as she talked, and she collapsed into Alice's lap against her will and slept while Alice sat unmoving, her hands on her niece's head as though to give a blessing.

When the sun rose Nessie went down to her own room, and they didn't talk again.


	16. Chapter 15

**AN: **Well, I am pretty much inexcusable. I completed my last term of school at the end of July (so, no more posting delays for that!), but then lost 2 months of my life to some truly heinous morning sickness. I will always work on this story; I'm not stopping until it's finished, no matter what. However, I am also writing my thesis, so updates might continue to be sporadic. Thank you all for sticking with me.

A quick refresher: Alice has arrived in Volterra and joined the guard, realizing that Aro had her in a checkmate. Nessie is not entirely pleased to see her.

* * *

The changes in protocol were immediate. Alice was given pride of place even over Renata, and stood a hair closer to Aro in the throne room. Nessie, on the other hand, had been banished to her bedroom and the outskirts of the palace complex as soon as Aro realized the degree to which she interfered with Alice's gift. If Nessie simply walked into the throne room, Aro's immediate future would disappear from Alice's sight—an inconvenience he was not willing to suffer.

For the same reason, he gave an official order that Nessie was not to be used on any missions whatsoever unless her particular abilities were required. He wanted full visibility into the outcome of every operation his guard conducted, without her scrambling the signal. This was a relief, after Bulgaria, but it made her wonder. She knew that her half-human state made her less than useful, knew that she had never been anything more than a bit of a pet to Aro, a piece of bait for bigger prey. Now that the bigger prey was caught, she couldn't be anything more than a nuisance to him. He possessed the jewel in the Cullen crown, the one he had truly wanted all this time. What use could Nessie possibly be to him anymore? And what would he do with her?

These thoughts made her edgy, and even though very little in her daily routine had changed, she was lonelier than she'd been before. She and Alice were never allowed to meet—after that first night, they subsisted mainly on significant glances and hands pressed in hallways on the odd occasions that they passed each other for a moment. Knowing that Alice was so close and still entirely out of her grasp made every solitary moment grate like sand under her eye.

Alice. Nessie couldn't bear to think of what Alice's absence was doing to their family, especially to Jasper. It had always seemed to Nessie like the two of them were fused together more fiercely than any other mated pair she'd known, and she couldn't even imagine what violence had been done to both of them in parting. Alice could say whatever she liked—Nessie knew it was her fault. She was just the excuse for all of this, yes, but without her existence there would have been no excuse. It was that simple. Everything she'd ever tried to do for her family had exploded in her face. Every step she took was the wrong one. Always would be.

The days twisted and blended one into another, growing grayer and more uniform with each passing week. Ze came to visit her once, to show her the cartographer's library she'd never found. "It's your sort of thing, I think," he said.

The room was paneled in wood all the way to the ceiling, full of shelves of atlases and old maps under glass cases. Huge maps the size of murals were framed on every wall, intricate in details of sea monsters and rugged terrain.

"Why is this even here?" Nessie asked, running her fingers down the spine of a gold-embossed atlas of East Asia.

"From what I understand, it's an abandoned passion of Aro's," said Ze. "He went through a period several hundred years ago when he was very interested in cartography and all of the new territory being discovered. He lost interest in it many years back, but the library is still here. Seldom used, I believe."

"Yes, I see that," said Nessie. Even though the room was spotless, like all the rest of the complex, it had a slightly danker air, like the door wasn't opened too often.

"You can come in here whenever you like; I doubt anyone will bother you."

She would have loved to sit with her mother in this room. Bella was the only person in the family who shared Nessie's fascination with the rest of the world, because she was the only other person in the family who hadn't seen it. They used to spin the globe in Carlisle's study and make vows that they would visit whatever spot their fingers landed on when they closed their eyes. It was usually somewhere in the middle of the ocean, but every once in a while they would get lucky and strike land.

She wandered over to one of the newer maps that had probably been added long after Aro had given up this pursuit, by Gianna, maybe. Nessie could tell it was very recent because it showed Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. She looked for the only one of those countries she'd ever visited, Bulgaria, and swallowed a sudden burst of anger. She knew she had promised herself not to kill, but somehow it seemed almost like an obligation to take seven or eight lives if it would save fifty. And she had no doubt that it would have.

Her eyes passed north from Bulgaria to Romania where the Volturi didn't go, out of a desire to keep the peace…

Ze's voice broke in on her musing. "I have some duties to attend to that will prohibit me from being in your general troublesome vicinity for the next several days, so I'll say goodbye."

"Will you come find me when whatever oh-so-important thing you're doing is finished?"

"Of course," he said. "It might be a while before I'm back, though. This is a large, sensitive operation. Felix, Chelsea, and the twins are coming with me."

New talent, Nessie realized. She shook her head and sighed, but he was already gone.

oOo

Later that afternoon Nessie was lying on her usual cushions in the main library when there was a knock on the door.

"Renesmee."

Nessie looked up from her book to see a pair of patent leather Mary Jane shoes. She lifted her head slightly higher and saw Jane smiling at her.

"Yes?"

"I've been asked to deliver you some news, as having you present in the throne room is inconvenient."

Nessie sat up.

"You're to be sent out on assignment tomorrow, back to where you were before. It seems Aro thinks your personal connection to our business there and your powers of persuasion might help us convince our friends to increase their shipments."

"Increase their shipments?"

"Yes."

"Aro wants me to get them to send more guns?"

Jane's teeth glistened in the light from the window. "Yes."

Nessie returned her eyes to her book and turned a page.

"Oh, and one more detail," said Jane. "This time, you'll be going alone."

"What?"

"Your usual companions are… needed elsewhere."

"How will I get there?"

"A _car_, I'd imagine."

"I... I don't have a driver's license."

Jane laughed. "Oh, yes you do. Gianna has it already. Or are you afraid of something else? Did you never learn to drive?"

"I know how to drive! I just...haven't much before..." She really didn't want to be having this conversation with Jane.

"Well you'd better get it right, then. Or you might do serious damage to your weak, precious flesh. Report to Gianna tomorrow morning for your documents."

oOo

Sleep didn't come that night. Nessie tried every position she could think of, but nothing helped. There would be no shutting her brain off this time.

At least she finally had her answer. Aro wanted her dead.

His every action and decision held worlds of strategic calculation. Her first mission had been well-planned for his purposes, and this one was no different. She knew she'd been wrong last time to ascribe him the motives of a simple sadist—wanting to torture her just to show her he could. He enjoyed that part, sure, but he'd sent her off because he wanted Alice to have a chance to see his plans, fall into his trap.

This time, he wanted to tie off loose ends. She'd almost committed a capital offense at her last meeting with the Bulgarians. If she caved and killed them on her second round, he could simply execute her when she returned. Felix and Chelsea wouldn't be there to stop her, if she lost control. If she didn't, well, he'd probably find some other reason and kill her in a day or two. She was a liability at this point. It was only a matter of time.

She found that the thought of dying didn't bother her at all. Heaven knew she'd wished for it more than once over the course of the past year. She could almost see it—all this horrible, endless future of misery just washed away, off her shoulders. What more could she ask, at this point in her life?

What bothered her was dying here, at the hands of the Volturi. After what they'd done to Fatima and Abdul, it seemed almost an insult to their memories to let the Volturi kill her, too. She'd made a sort of unconscious vow to her dead friends that she would never let the Volturi win, whatever that ended up meaning. She growled and threw her pillow to the floor, letting her head hit the bare mattress.

Her numbed, smothered sense of justice sprang to life like a banked fire. Could she really let them kill her? Could she really die like this, on Aro's terms? After everything he'd done, all the misery and destruction and death his guard had dealt out over the whole earth, with their dubious ideas about secrecy…

Tomorrow. She would think about this tomorrow. She absolutely _had_ to sleep. She picked up her pillow again and rolled onto her stomach, and after a while she began to drift into half-sleep, not sure if she was dreaming about ancient maps or just thinking about them, with monsters in the oceans and lines drawn across Romania…

She sat up with a start and slammed her palms to the mattress, fully awake.

Romania.

Secrecy.

Gold incisor, in the gloom of a St. Denis warehouse.

_What are you going to do? Drink him dry?_

Felix, sitting casually across a table from the man in the sunglasses.

_Who was responsible?_

_One of our kind._

They broke the law. Their one law, for which they punished everyone else. They broke it all the time. It had never seemed extraordinary, because she had always expected their hypocrisy.

But she…

She raised a hand to her face, realizing for the first time that maybe her gift could indeed give her power that meant something.

She had proof. She could show it to anyone.

The Romanians wanted to take down the Volturi more than just about anyone else. If anyone could make use of her information someday, it would be them.

And Alice couldn't see her do it. Aro wouldn't know until she came back.

Now that… that was an all right way to die.

oOo

The next day, Nessie discovered a strange phenomenon—when you're on a suicide mission, you can still be incredibly picky about how exactly you end your life. She did not want to die, for instance, in a head-on collision with this truck full of chickens, but it was looking like a possibility. She white-knuckled the steering wheel and jerked hard to the right, hopefully not hard enough to go off the side of the mountain. The truck skittered past, horn blazing, and she righted the Mercedes and took a deep, shuddering breath. She hated driving.

At home, various members of her family had contributed to teaching her to drive, so she'd gotten a pretty thorough education. She'd just never done it alone or on roads with more than one or two other cars. It was technically illegal and they'd have had no good explanations if she'd gotten pulled over or crashed somewhere.

Plus, one of her grandfathers was a cop.

She glanced down at the map she'd spread over the passenger seat. It was time to pull over and figure out where she was going from Slovenia. She couldn't afford to get lost. As soon as the road shoulder fanned out to a decent size again she pulled over. Small snowflakes began to collect around the edges of the windshield, blurring the mountain landscape outside.

She'd gotten out of bed at five that morning and gone to find Gianna, knowing that every moment she spent in the palace complex was a moment when Aro could, unlikely as it was, ask for her hand and read her every thought. She found Gianna standing behind her desk with a gigantic mug of coffee in her manicured hands, looking annoyed and sleep-deprived. Gianna handed Nessie a French passport and driver's license that named her _Inesse Volture, _a credit card, a cell phone, a debrief sheet with psychological profiles for each of her contacts, and a map of her route into Bulgaria.

"Ah…" said Nessie.

Gianna pursed her lips and tapped a finger against her mug.

"Thanks for this. I just, you know, my driving experience is kind of limited, and since I'm travelling alone I thought maybe it would be good to have something a little more comprehensive, like a road atlas or something?"

Gianna rolled her eyes and bent to open a drawer. She dropped a thick, folded map onto the counter and Nessie opened it just enough to see that it contained Romania. She muttered another thank you and swept the whole pile of stuff off the counter. When Gianna turned to look at something else, Nessie let the cell phone hit the carpet gently. She didn't want them tracking her; she'd seen movies where that happened. If they found the phone after she left, they could chalk it up to half-human incompetence.

Hours and hours later and her palms were still sweating. The Mercedes had GPS, but just like the cell phone, she was afraid to use it. All she had was this map and one very, very convenient memory. It would have to be enough to get her there.

She never thought she would be grateful for all of the detailed stories Vladimir and Stefan had told her about their disturbing lives in Romania. Bella had done her best, in the weeks when all the vampire visitors were staying at their house in Washington, to keep Nessie away from the creepy older men, but Nessie had a curious streak, especially when it came to things her mother didn't want her to know.

One of the things they had told her was where they lived.

"Oh, it is glorious, child," said Stefan. "You should see it one day. High, high in the Carpathian Mountains, at the very heart of our native land would we come to be worshipped. Much has changed in the days since we were at the apex of our power, but our home has not changed at all. It has retained every ounce of our majesty."

"Yes, yes," said Vladimir. "In those wonderful days vampires made pilgrimages to us; the way to our thrones in the sky from the barbarian lands of Europe was known and recited by heart, by all those who knew it would enlighten them to find us."

"Now," said Stefan sadly, "The way has not changed, but no one comes anymore. But then, no one comes to pay tribute to those upstart pretenders in Italy, either! Perhaps the world has lost its sense of deference as the years have gone by, and 'Take the E574 to Câmpulung and then climb Moldoveanu' just doesn't inspire the sort of feeling that stirs the heart of a pilgrim."

It didn't tell her much, but Câmpulung was indeed marked on her map. She still had to cross Croatia and Serbia, and she was running on a sleepless night. She pulled back onto the road, found a Europop station on the radio, and turned the volume all the way up. She only popped the clutch once more before crossing the border.

As she wound through Croatia she urged the Mercedes faster and faster. She had no idea how much time she had, or how the blank spots in Alice's vision really worked. Would all the consequences of Nessie's actions be hidden, or could something pop up that would alert Aro to the fact that Nessie had gone rogue? She didn't care if he found out; she just wanted to make sure she'd have time to pass on her information before Aro could stop her.

She stopped for gas in a small town in Serbia where no one seemed to possess the ability to smile, and made it across the Romanian border as the sun was going down. Her eyes felt gritty and her arms heavy, but she had plenty of adrenaline and Europop on her side, so she didn't stop. The E574 wasn't in terribly good repair, but she managed not to slow down too much. Signs for Câmpulung began to loom up in the darkness, and a few moments later she pulled off down a side street in the middle of the silent town.

She needed to find a place to sleep. She needed to find someone who spoke French or English or German or Italian, or heck, Mandarin or Arabic would work too, but that probably wasn't likely to help her out much. She didn't speak...Romanian, or whatever it was they spoke here.

She drove through the sleeping streets at about 20 miles per hour, looking for an inn or motel or something. She stopped at the one place that had its lights on—a gas station. She parked and walked in, the door tinkling as she pulled it open. There was a man at the counter in a thick black coat and a pair of fingerless gloves, fiddling with an old tire. The place was lit by one naked bulb, and it wasn't heated. Nessie was already shivering.

She cleared her throat and he creaked into a standing position, blinking at her. She pointed at her car, sitting by the gas pump. He came out from behind his counter and she followed him out into the biting wind.

While he was filling her tank, she cleared her throat again, tilted her head, and placed her hands underneath her right cheek. He nodded and started talking in a language she didn't know. He waved his hand in the general direction of up-the-street, and then held up three fingers.

Good enough.

She handed him the wad of Romanian Leu she'd changed at the border. That morning she'd pulled a bunch of Euros from an ATM in Italy with the credit card Gianna gave her, knowing she couldn't charge anything on it in Romania. The man peeled off two bills and handed back the rest, and she got back in the car and moved three buildings up, to a little concrete house with yellow window curtains. There weren't any lights on. She pulled around the back and knocked timidly on the kitchen door. There was a grumble and a crash from upstairs, and then heavy footsteps tramping down to the door, which opened with a creaking protest.

A tiny, stoop-backed woman in a faded pink dressing gown stood before her with hair falling out of her gray bun. Nessie held up her money and did the sleeping pantomime again. The woman squinted at her bills and gestured for her to come in. The kitchen was small and grimy, dirty dishes stacked on the white linoleum counter. Nessie followed as the woman led her up a set of stairs, turning on lights as she went. She stopped at a door next to the landing, handed Nessie a key off a ring from the front pocket of her robe, and shuffled away. Nessie stood there for a moment, looking at the key, and then fit it into the lock and turned the handle.

There was a twin bed in the corner, with a flannel blanket stretched across it. A pedestal sink stood on the opposite end. The walls were a lighter shade of yellow than the curtains. She tugged off her pants and her shirt and barely managed to pull the blanket to her chin before she fell asleep.

* * *

Thank you for reading. I've just returned from India, so I should have consistent enough internet access to answer reviews again.


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